Good overview of the greatest plague of the 20th Century
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I thoroughly enjoyed Kolata's book "The Flu" about the 1918 influenza outbreak that killed millions worldwide and has been all but forgotten by the descendents of the survivors.
Some reviewers (here and in the states) seem remarkably peeved that Kolata didn't write a scientific/ medical textbook....well, I think it's obvious that she was writing for the "average" person interested in this time period and this amazing outbreak of illness that spread so fast and was so deadly. Kolata is the science reporter for the "New York Times" and her writing is geared to the person interested in science and/or medicine but not an expert. The expert can obviously go elsewhere for more in-depth discussions of viral mutations and theories about pigs, birds and other animals as "vectors" or "way stations" for the virus to use to mutate and become more lethal. Kolata expresses this clearly, makes it straight forward, and lets you know when something is a theory or a fact.
The amazing coincidence (or not?) of this great outbreak coinciding with World War I is discussed and the concept made clear: the young soldiers crowded in unsanitary trenches or onboard crowded troop ships WERE the main reason the flu, once it took hold in one group of (most likely) American GI's,was able to spread world-wide. The war was truly a world war, and in the end there was not, according to Kolata's sources, ONE SINGLE nation or any populated part of the earth untouched by this plague. Reading parts of this book gave me chills. I have a hard time dealing with those worried about Ms Kolata's PC purity in preferring one scientist to another in telling her story....
Among the Inuit (Eskimo)people, whole villages were completey wiped out and the people buried in mass graves. Similarly, other areas without what was then "modern medicine" were likewise affected.
One particularly nasty thing about that flu was that it struck down children and healthy young men and women in the prime of life. Unlike most flu today, which is likely to kill only the very old, the weak, those with impaired immune systems, the 1918 flu destroyed whole families, or left children orphans without any parents, or parents without any children.
On a personal note, I know that both my grandparents caught it, and were extremely sick. They were considered likely to die and plans were made to whom to give their small children. They both survived, as did their children, but 50-some years later my Grandfather developed Parkinson's disease. It is known now that this is a late effect the flu had on some survivors. Interestingly (but tragically as well) one of his sons who would have been a toddler at the time of flu outbreak, also developed Parkinson's as an older man. It is unknown now if he himself had suffered a case of the flu or not, but it seems likely.
Kolata, after explaining the most likely theories of HOW the flu mutated, and the role of pigs in this transformation, then spent some time describing the extreme fear, almost paranoia, of the citizenry once it fully took hold.
She then moves forward to the present (at the time of the writing of the book) when scientists were trying to find samples of the virus that had caused this flu outbreak to study them, in part to know WHY it was so lethal. The tragedy of the Inuits then came into play, as groups of scientists decided the permafrost of their environment was the best place to attempt to find live virus. They ended up digging up the mass graves of the villagers---after getting permission from the current Inuit people of the area---and finally found some live virus deep in the lung tissue of a middle-aged and obese woman who had died from it. Her body build was part of the reason the virus had survived within her.
I thought all of this section described so far was a fascinating medical detective story, right up there with the novels of some of the current medical/crime bestsellers.
Some reviewers have complained that she got off the track spending time on the so-called "Swine Flu" vaccination campaign (in the U.S.) in the 1970's. She may have been reaching but there is a connection since pigs were believed to be the life form in which the virus mutated in 1918.
Similarly, the Avian Flu, still a real concern, required some notice in a book about a world-wide pandemic. The great plagues of history have all, for some reason, seemed to have originated in Asia, often in Mongolia, so the Chinese connection with Avian Flu is important to be aware of.
Other excellent books ( I think) on this subject are Laurie Garrett's "The Coming Plague" which really gets into the depth some reviewer's wanted with Kolata, and cover the role of the destruction of the Rain Forest and deforestation in Africa in the emergance of Ebola, HIV and others. "Rats, Lice, and History" though an older book is small, but absolutely fascinating on the subject of what role the title characters have played in human history and cultures. "Justinian's Flea" and Ziegler's "the Black Death" are also fascinating.
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Absolutely gripping
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In August of 1918, the flu returned after its summer hiatus. However, something had seriously gone wrong after the mild flu of the preceding winter. Soldiers, and other young, healthy people started dying of a terrible pneumonia. The leading doctors of the era slaved to find a cure, but the disease seemed resistant to every step they took. Finally, after having carried away some 100 million people(!), the disease simply disappeared. This book tells the tale of that last great pandemic, and the subsequent search to identify the virus, to see to it that the disease never returns. Among the biggest events that it covers are the plague year of 1918, the Swine Flu fiasco of 1976, and the 1997 race to stop the spread of a deadly avian flu that was spreading in Hong Kong. I found this book to be nothing short of gripping! I had read several references to the 1918 flu, but have never really understood the matter. Indeed, the author's treatment of the 1976 Swine Flu and 1997 Hong Kong chicken flu (both of which I do remember) made a number of things suddenly come quite clear. I deeply enjoyed reading this book, and give it my highest recommendation. If you want to read a gripping whodunit, or a medical-type history book, or want to under current events pertaining to diseases, then I strongly suggest that you read this book!
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Deceptively titled
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FLU: THE STORY OF THE GREAT INFLUENZA PANDEMIC OF 1918 AND THE SEARCH FOR THE VIRUS THAT CAUSED IT starts out impressively with a chapter on the influenza pandemic of 1918, which globally caused the caused the deaths of at least 20-40 million people (and perhaps up to 100 million), followed by a chapter on the history of disease pandemics and death in history. I thought, wow, this could be another riveting book like 1994's HOT ZONE, which was inspired by the Ebola virus. However, in its middle chapters, FLU drifted off course to a discussion of other flu scares of the late 20th century, specifically the Swine Flu fiasco of 1976 and the Hong Kong Flu panic of 1977. In retrospect, neither was relevant to the deadly 1918 virus except to illustrate the epidemiologists' fixation with influenza as a potentially catastrophic killer. Thus, the book should perhaps have been titled FLU: THE BOGEY MAN UNDERNEATH EPIDEMIOLOGISTS' BEDS. Moreover, though author Gina Kolata did return to the "search for" subtheme, even that fizzled by the end. The hunt for the 1918 virus, and a delineation of what made it so uniquely vicious, remains a story whose ending remains to be written. The HIV virus has replaced the influenza virus as the focus of the scientific community's investigative efforts. There was one aspect of FLU that I did find notable, and that was a hint of gender bias on the part of the author towards the book's three principal "heroes": Dr. Johan Hultin, Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, and Dr. Kirsty Duncan. All three attempted to recover the 1918 virus from the lung tissue of victims that died from the disease. Hultin, a San Francisco pathologist, went looking for corpses of Eskimos buried in the Alaskan permafrost. Duncan, a geographer by profession, organized the exhumation of dead miners buried at Spitzbergen, Norway. Taubenberger, an MD/PhD researcher with the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, went rummaging among tissue samples preserved in paraffin blocks stored for decades at the institute. Kolata admiringly described the professional pedigrees and accomplishments of both Hultin and Taubenberger, but virtually ignored Duncan, except to infer that her "long hair and doe eyes and raw emotions" may have had an unsettling effect on the marriage of one of her team members. Oh, and that Duncan's own marriage broke up. (Was this relevant? Who cares?) Moreover, images of Hultin and Taubenberger hard at work are featured in the volume's too paltry section of photographs, but not Duncan. And, in the "Acknowledgements", the author thanks Hultin and Taubenberger for their "extraordinary assistance", but no gratitude, however lukewarm, is awarded Duncan. Do I perceive some cattiness here? Meow! I found FLU marginally interesting, but it in no way met expectations. I wouldn't recommend buying it unless you're obsessed with the subject matter.
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