FLU: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. Gina Kolata. Farrar Straus & Giroux. $25. 256 pp.
One of the great unanswered questions about the 1918 influenza pandemic is why and how an event that claimed the lives of 500,000 Americans and at least 20 million people across the world was nearly erased from our collective consciousness.
The New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata's engrossing new book, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It, never answers that question satisfactorily. The book does, however, succeed in its main mission -- helping resurrect a healthy fear for a common but potentially deadly virus.
As Kolata points out in her introduction, the family trees of many American families were shaken and rearranged by the great influenza outbreak. My own mother's father, like Kolota's husband's, died of complications from the flu, leaving my grandmother to raise four young children alone. The influenza's death toll in the United States may have reached as high as 100 million, one of Kolata's experts argues.
The sheer magnitude of the pandemic was not all that was different about this flu. Its chief victims were adults in their prime, not the youngest or the frail elderly, who most often succumb to other flu strains.
A sense of the terror is imparted in this letter from a doctor stationed at Fort Devens, Mass., in September 1918 near the end of World War I:
"For the several days there were no coffins and the bodies piled up something fierce and we used to go down to the morgue [which is in back of my ward] and look at the boys laid out in long rows. It beat any sight they ever had in France after a battle."
The influenza outbreak, which crested in the fall of 1918, was greeted with an eerie silence from doctors, military historians and medical textbooks in the decades after the event. The best explanation offered for the silence came from the pandemic's few historians, including Alfred W. Crosby, who was a primary source for Kolata. The pandemic was simply subsumed into a general remembrance of the horrors of World War I.
The question of what made the flu so virulent did capture the imagination of a handful of modern investigators, whose sometimes macabre quest to discover the genetic code of the strain in corpses of flu victims makes up the body of the book.
Here Kolata stitches together the personal stories of unlikely heroes who made the genetic coding of a long dead virus a passionate quest. Johan Hultin, for instance, was an intrepid young medical student in Alaska who in the early 1950s tried to recover traces of the virus in the lungs of Eskimos buried in permafrost in a remote Alaskan village. The scientific tools of the time failed Hultin, who never forgot the graves. Four decades later, at 72, the retired pathologist returned to the village alone, armed only with a shovel, and managed to get tissues that eventually yielded key clues to the virus.
In delicious contrast, Kolata chronicles a major expedition to dig up seven miners buried in a Norwegian town. The expensive enterprise was armed with the latest technological tools and accompanied by documentary camera but crews found no usable tissue.
Along the way, readers of Flu are taken on many fascinating side trips. They will for instance, get a good primer in molecular makeup of viruses and why China is probably the cradle of all pandemics.
The book unfortunately ends without the final chapter. Clues to the nature of the virus have been revealed but the secret of what made it so virulent has not yet been discovered. That, of course, is what drove the quest in the first place, the knowledge that such a flu could happen again. In a global economy, in which microbes are traded as quickly as goods, those secrets still need to be uncovered if we are to be prepared for the dreaded replay.