First case of Spanish flu reported in U.S. - March 11, 1918

On this day in 1918, the first case of the Spanish flu was reported in the U.S.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class. It's a production of I
Heart Radio. Hi everyone, I'm Eves and welcome to This
Day in History Class, a podcast where we rip out
a page from the history books every day. Today is
March eleventh. The day was March eleventh, nineteen eighteen. The

(00:28):
first case of the Spanish flu was reported in the US.
In nineteen eighteen. The H one and one influenza virus
caused an extremely deadly flu pandemic. It caused at least
fifty million deaths around the world, making it the deadliest
pandemic of the twentieth century. On the morning of March eleventh,
Private Albert Kitchel of the U. S Army went to

(00:50):
the camp infirmary and Fort Riley, Kansas with a fever.
By noon, more than one dred soldiers had also reported
symptoms of fever, sore throat, and headaches. That number increased
exponentially over the next week. Many of those soldiers died
of pneumonia that spring. Their cases are the first known
ones of the nineteen eighteen flu epidemic. That said, the

(01:13):
true origin of the Spanish flu is unknown. Army camps
and prisons around the country began to see cases of
the deadly flu, and the flu spread to Europe from
the US. The illness became known as the Spanish influenza
because it was first officially recognized in Spain, a country
that was neutral during World War One. That meant that

(01:33):
the press was not as censored as in other countries,
so the Spanish media was the first to widely report
on the spread of the flu in May of nineteen eighteen.
Once the flu made it across the globe, the number
of cases only continued to rise, and it spread really
fast to Russia, China, the Philippines, New Zealand, and places
in North Africa. The virus traveled along international shipping lanes

(01:58):
and it followed the massive groups of people who had
to travel due to the war. The overcrowding that was
ubiquitous under the conditions of war also helped the flu spread.
But even after the First World War ended in November
of nineteen eighteen, the pandemic surged on. In fact, flu
cases increased as soldiers demobilized and people celebrated the war's end.

(02:22):
Industries declined in public spaces such as movie theaters and
schools shut down. The Spanish flu had a super high
fatality rate On top of that, the flu was unusually
deadly for young adults. There was no vaccine for flu
infections and no antibiotics to treat bacterial infections related to
the flu. Though there were initiatives to develop a vaccine,

(02:43):
those efforts were not fruitful since researchers were focused on bacterium,
so the flu was contained through methods like isolation, good hygiene,
wearing masks, disinfectants, and restrictions on public gatherings. Adding to
the spread in the US was the professional nurses, since
many were away at military camps and institutions, es stewed

(03:05):
black nurses. There were three waves of the H one
and one flu pandemic, with the last occurring during the
winter and spring of nineteen nineteen. That last wave subsided
by the summer, but in the end the virus had
infected an estimated one third of the world's population. Influenza
was first isolated in nineteen thirty, showing that the flu

(03:27):
is caused by a virus rather than a bacterium. Vaccination
against the flu began in the nineteen thirties, with the
vaccine becoming more widely available in the following decades. There
were around six and seventy five thousand deaths due to
the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic in the United States. Though
the virus that caused the pandemic has been extensively researched,

(03:49):
it's still unclear why it was so deadly. H one
and one viruses distantly related to the nineteen eighteen virus
popped back up in two thousand and nine, caused using
another pandemic known as the swine flu. I'm Eve Steff
Coote and hopefully you know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. If you have any burning

(04:10):
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at i heart media dot com. Thanks for listening. I
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(04:38):
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