The local newspaper, the Santa Fe Monitor, confirms that something odd was happening around that time: “Mrs. The report itself no longer exists, but it stands as the first recorded notice anywhere in the world of unusual influenza activity that year. We cannot say for certain that that happened in 1918 in Haskell County, but we do know that an influenza outbreak struck in January, an outbreak so severe that, although influenza was not then a “reportable” disease, a local physician named Loring Miner-a large and imposing man, gruff, a player in local politics, who became a doctor before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease but whose intellectual curiosity had kept him abreast of scientific developments-went to the trouble of alerting the U.S. Scientists today understand that bird influenza viruses, like human influenza viruses, can also infect hogs, and when a bird virus and a human virus infect the same pig cell, their different genes can be shuffled and exchanged like playing cards, resulting in a new, perhaps especially lethal, virus. Another clue is that the county sits on a major migratory flyway for 17 bird species, including sand hill cranes and mallards. It had been cattle country-a now bankrupt ranch once handled 30,000 head-but Haskell farmers also raised hogs, which is one possible clue to the origin of the crisis that would terrorize the world that year. In 1918 sod houses were still common, barely distinguishable from the treeless, dry prairie they were dug out of. Haskell County, Kansas, lies in the southwest corner of the state, near Oklahoma and Colorado. New Contributed Photographs Collection / otis historical Archives / National Museum of Health and Medicine
“Of the 12 men who slept in my squad room, 7 were ill at one time,” a soldier recalled. An emergency hospital at Camp Funston, Kansas, 1918.
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