The Spanish Flu and Lucy’s DNA

As COVID 19 spreads across the world, self-isolation allows us to research our history, seeking knowledge.  The “Spanish flu” pandemic that spread across the United States in the early 1900s seems pertinent now.

Why was it called the Spanish Flu?
“Spain was one of only a few major European countries to remain neutral during World War I. Unlike in the Allied and Central Powers nations, where wartime censors suppressed news of the flu to avoid affecting morale, the Spanish media was free to report on it in gory detail. News of the sickness first made headlines in Madrid in late-May 1918, and coverage only increased after the Spanish King Alfonso XIII came down with a nasty case a week later. Since nations undergoing a media blackout could only read in-depth accounts from Spanish news sources, they naturally assumed that the country was the pandemic’s ground zero. The Spanish, meanwhile, believed the virus had spread to them from France, so they took to calling it the “French Flu.”1
When was it first seen in the United States?
In April of 1918, a weekly public health report notified officials of influenza in a military camp located in Haskell, Kansas. This would be the first documentation of the “Spanish flu” in our history. There were eighteen soldiers afflicted with severe influenza symptoms and three deceased.2
Why is the Spanish flu suspected of originating in China?
Although the first documented case of “Spanish flu” was in the United States, Mark Humphries of Canada’s Memorial University of Newfoundland believes the “Spanish flu” originated in China. Humphries is the author of, “The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada.“ Humphries’s research revealed a severe respiratory illness in Northern China in November of 1918. Physicians in China described a highly contagious, respiratory infection, causing headaches, fevers, pneumonia, and shortness of breath. The disease seemed more deadly to middle-age, otherwise healthy, individuals. Chinese authorities never issued travel restrictions or quarantines and referred to it as a “winter sickness.” The disease caused dozens of deaths in China, each day and spread 300 miles in six weeks.
How did the Spanish Flu move from China to the United States?
During World War I the British Government formed the Chinese Labor Corps to assist France with the war effort. Beginning in April of 1917, men from Northern China, of “perfect physique” were recruited and shipped to France.  The ships arrived with laborers who were subsequently shipped via railcar to various locations.  There were 94,000 men shipped from China to Southern England and France.
Shipping the laborers around Africa was too time-consuming and tied up too much shipping, so British officials turned to shipping the laborers to Vancouver on the Canadian West Coast and sending them by train to Halifax on the East Coast, from which they could be sent to Europe. So desperate was the need for labor that on March 2, 1918, a ship loaded with 1,899 Chinese Labor Corps men left the Chinese port of Wehaiwei for Vancouver despite “plague” stopping the recruiting for workers there. In reaction to anti-Chinese feelings rife in western Canada at the time, the trains that carried the workers from Vancouver were sealed, Humphries says. Special Railway Service Guards watched the laborers, who were kept in camps surrounded by barbed wire. Newspapers were banned from reporting on their movement.3 Dan Vergano
Who was Lucy?
In November of 1918 the Spanish flu reached Brevig mission, a tiny outpost in Alaska.  It was brought into the village by the weekly mail carrier.  Within five days 72 of their 80 residents were dead, leaving only eight children and teenagers. August 23, 1997 Lucy was discovered.
In August 1997, a scientist named Johan Hultin from San Francisco traveled to Brevig Mission and, with permission of the town’s elders, excavated the local cemetery to try and unearth a victim of the outbreak buried deep within the frozen tundra. He hoped to extract a sample of human tissue that contained a hibernating specimen of the 1918 flu virus. On August 23, Hultin found a female body seven feet down that was remarkably well preserved. “I sat on a pail—turned upside down—and looked at her,” Hultin recalled in Gina Kolata’s 2001 book Flu. She was an obese woman; she had fat in her skin and around her organs and that served as a protection from the occasional short-term thawing of permafrost. Those on the other side of her were not obese and they had decayed. I sat on the pail and saw this woman in a state of good preservation. And I knew that this was where the virus [sample] has got to come from, shedding light on the mysteries of 1918. With an autopsy knife, Hultin sliced out most of her lungs and immersed the sections in a chemical solution. Then he and his crew carefully reburied the woman he’d named Lucy. Once he returned to San Francisco, Hultin sent the samples to Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. Taubenberger was able to decode the virus’ entire genetic sequence, a historic achievement in itself. Later, Taubenberger and his team reconstructed the Spanish flu’s complete gene sequence and in 2005 successfully re-grew the virus, a feat never before accomplished with an extinct disease. That raised obvious ethical and security issues, since the virus—which is 25 times more deadly than the regular seasonal flu—could conceivably be used as a biological weapon or accidentally released. But Taubenberger believed the benefits of studying the live virus outweighed the dangers. “It’s clear that the 1918 virus remains particularly lethal,” Taubenberger said after bringing about its Lazarus-like resurrection, “and determining whether pandemic influenza virus strains can emerge via different pathways will affect the scope and focus of surveillance and prevention efforts.” Deciphering how a particular virus operates opens up insights into other viral strains and reveals how they grow, mutate, jump from animal to animal, and attack their hosts. Research based on Lucy’s lung tissue has already led to improved flu vaccines that have prevented larger epidemics, and, ideally, someday scientists will build on Hultin and Taubenberger’s work to uncover a genetic Achilles heel in one strain that makes it possible to wipe out all of them. As for Hultin, he left something behind for the residents of Brevig Mission in 1997. Two white wooden crosses that once marked the cemetery’s perimeter had rotted away to almost nothing. Before rushing back to San Francisco, the 72-year-old scientist constructed two new crosses, which he mounted where the originals had stood. They were his tribute to the dead and his thank-you to the community that had shown him such hospitality—and given so much to medical science.4 Andrew Carroll

  1. https://www.history.com/news/why-was-it-called-the-spanish-flu [↩]
  2. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/pandemic-timeline-1918.htm [↩]
  3. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/ [↩]
  4. https://www.historynet.com/alaskan-village-holds-key-understanding-1918-spanish-flu.htm [↩]

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