Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

by Gina Kolata

Some of the specialists in influenza saw the new flu strain and its ties to the 1918 flu as an excuse to try an immunization campaign that might vastly improve upon what happened in the last flu pandemic, the Hong Kong flu of 1968. That time, too few were immunized, and too late, to staunch the virus’s spread. But most others had a different response to the 1918 metaphor. It “came as a bolt from the blue,” to many who had to make a decision, Neustadt and May wrote, “capturing imaginations and dominating impressions. Though the 1918 influenza holds but a small place in most histories, biographies, and memoirs, it seems that almost everyone at higher levels in the federal government in 1976 had a parent, uncle, aunt, cousin, or at least a family friend who had told lurid tales of personal experience with the 1918 flu. The killer had been known then as ‘Spanish flu’: the term ‘swine flu’ meant nothing much to laymen off the farm. But the year 1918—more precisely 1918–1919—cited in conjunction with the flu called up vivid images in Washington almost sixty years later. Those images were rooted in folk history and were more powerful because of it.”