Basic HTML Version
influenza
The USS Pittsburgh, one of many ships
which harbored a deadly strain of
Spanish Influenza on board, sickening
663 sailors (80% of the crew) and killing
58 of them in the Fall of 1918.
Elusive, evolving flu
difficult to predict
Images courtesy of (top) U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, (center) National Museum of Health and Medicine,
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C., United States, (bottom) Courtesy of Lieutenant Commander
Ellis M. Zacharias, USN, 1931, U.S. Naval Historical Center.
By Claudia S. Copeland, PhD
The year was 1918, and the world was reeling from a new,
lethal strain of influenza.
Fueled by wartime conditions,
the deadly disease spread fromcountry to country, the
epidemic soon turning into a pandemic that by mid-
summer had laid waste to soldiers across the Euro-
pean battlefields and beyond. Then, in mid-Septem-
ber, an oil-tanker with sick and dead crew members
docked in New Orleans. The ship was immediately
quarantined and the sick treated at a local hospital.
Three days later, though, a United Fruit Company ship
arrived with 11 more patients on board. With con-
stant arrivals into this busy international port, it was
impossible to contain the virus. Ten days after the first
influenza patients had disembarked in the city, the first
local case had been identified—the deadly Spanish Flu,
as it was known, had hit New Orleans.
e