At the following web site you can read the transcript of a documentary on the 1918 flu:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/filmmore/transcript/transcript1.html
If you search for “manure” you will get to this part:
NARRATION: Some say it began in the spring of 1918, when soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas, burned tons of manure. A gale kicked up. A choking duststorm swept out over the land — a stinging, stinking yellow haze. The sun went dead black in Kansas.
NARRATION: Two days later — on March 11th, 1918 — an Army private reported to the camp hospital before breakfast. He had a fever, sore, throat, headache… nothing serious. One minute later, another soldier showed up. By noon, the hospital had over a hundred cases; in a week, 500.
NARRATION: That spring, forty-eight soldiers — all in the prime of life — died at Fort Riley. The cause of death was listed as: pneumonia.
NARRATION: The sickness then seemed to disappear — leaving as quickly as it had come.
(skip down)
NARRATION: That summer and fall, over one and a half million Americans crossed the Atlantic for war. But some of those doughboys came from Kansas. And they’d brought something with them: a tiny, silent companion.
NARRATION: Almost immediately, the Kansas sickness resurfaced in Europe. American soldiers got sick. English soldiers. French. German. As it spread, the microbe mutated — day by day becoming more and more deadly.
NARRATION: By the time the silent traveller came back to America, it had become a relentless killer
Anybody understand what this is saying about how it started in Kansas? Are they saying the virus was in the manure? I’ve heard the 1918 virus was an avian virus, but there was no mention of birds in this documentary. What kind of manure would they have been burning there? Horse manure? Cows?
Horse, I think I read, but that doesn’t mean there were no other farm/food animals on the grounds (pigs?), nor migratory waterfowl; a likely virus reservoir.
So if it is true that the flu did start there and then in Kansas, then the virus first jumped from birds or whatever to people in mid March. It killed some people (just like H5N1) and made carriers out of others (like H5N1?). By the time the summer came, it had suddenly mutated to be H2H? And by the fall it was extremely contagious and deadly and all over the place. So can anyone explain to me why there are intelligent people thinking we’ve got years before a pandemic breaks out? I know it might be that this is not the big one, but it might be the big one and it only takes a matter of weeks.
Ran across this, New York Times reporter Gina Kolata : http://www.webmd.com/content/article/1/1707_50029.htm
..”Many people everywhere say they have vivid memories of how their families or their towns were transformed by the flu of 1918. But the history records that most people refer to were kept by Europeans.
In China, for example, one researcher says he has found descriptions of what sounds like the 1918 flu but coming even earlier than 1918. He suggests that the flu even started in southern China and was brought to Europe by Chinese laborers who dug the trenches during the war.
But the records are so poor that his hypotheses are hard to nail down. The same is true for many tales of the flu’s social impact.”…
…The first signs of the deadly 1918 flu were in Boston and in an army camp nearby, Camp Devens. Earlier in 1918, many places, including Fort Riley, had been hit by an ordinary-seeming flu that did not kill like the one that struck in the fall
I think the Ft. Riley thing got started partly because there were pigs nearby and one hypothesis says that pigs gave the 1918 flu to humans. Another hypothesis, however, says humans gave it to pigs
Whatever the true story is, there is no compelling evidence that the flu started in Fort Riley and much evidence to the contrary.
…I asked a scientist about the manure story and he said it was, well, manure…”
If memory serves, I believe it was pig manure. But the last information i have seen pointed to a camp in europe on the western front during the first world war as the likely starting point. Again close liveing conditions and many animals in camp as food stock. As well as a generaly unhealty liveing condition for the people there. I may be incorrect. If so please let me know. Thank you.
As a life-long horse owner I doubt it was horse manure. It doesn’t burn well at all. It may have been chicken as that does burn as does pig manure. I don’t know why they would have burned pig manure when they could have spread it on fields and gained the nutrient value of it (this was before petro-chemical fertilizers remember). Chicken manure however, is too “hot” to spread on fields without composting it first.
Old threads being closed.