With a pandemic sweeping the world and a quickly spreading virus, our thoughts have turned to another pandemic that affected South Carolina just over 100 years ago. The 1918 influenza pandemic, also referred to as the Spanish Flu, began during WWI but not in Spain, as the name would suggest. The origin is thought to have been a wartime staging camp in France that included an overcrowded hospital. According to some statistics, more than 100,000 soldiers passed through the camp every day in the north of France. The camp raised pigs for food and a team of scientists determined the new flu strain jumped from birds to the pigs.

The Spanish flu was first recognized as widespread in the camp in 1917. By the spring of 1918 it had crossed the Atlantic and made its way to the US.
Wikimedia Commons/By Photo Credit: Cynthia GoldsmithContent Providers(s): CDC/ Dr. Terrence Tumpey/ Cynthia Goldsmith - This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library (PHIL), with identification number #8243
What began in the spring as a mild flu returned in the fall. And by mid-October, Camp Jackson had reported 39 cases of the newer, stronger H1N1 influenza virus, a.k.a. the Spanish flu.
Wikimedia Commons/By Daniel J Barnett, Ran D Balicer, Daniel R Lucey, George S Everly, Saad B Omer, Mark C Steinhoff, Itamar Grotto - Daniel J Barnett et. al. "A Systematic Analytic Approach to Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Planning", PLoS Medicine doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020359, CC BY 4.0
Roughly six weeks later, at the end of November, a staggering 8,255 cases were reported within the camp — with 412 fatalities.
Wikipedia/Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine - Emergency hospital during influenza epidemic (NCP 1603), National Museum of Health and Medicine.
The image above is not from the archives at Camp Jackson. It was taken during the 1918 flu pandemic at Fort Riley, Kansas.

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The mortality rate from the 1918 flu pandemic was in the neighborhood of sixty to seventy percent. Many people died of complications associated with pneumonia.
Wikimedia Commons/ Greene, Charles Lyman, 1862
The image depicting a lung scan is from the National Archives and Records Administration. The notation on the x-ray indicates it was taken on the ninth day of the patient's flu. The year 1918 can be seen in the top left of the slide.
But Camp Jackson isn't the only place the flu pandemic reached in South Carolina. Populations within the entire state were afflicted with the deadly flu strain. In the tiny milling town of Clinton, for instance, 600 residents caught the flu.
National Archives and Records Administration
One report indicates that in Greenville, alone, 1,000 new people per day caught the flu in a short four-day period in October 1918. Of course, there were other cases reported throughout Greenville and the rest of South Carolina during the entire course of the pandemic.
By the time the flu pandemic had begun to recede, some 50,000 cases were on record in the state and 14,250 South Carolinians had died from the flu or complications due to the flu.
Wikimedia Commons/Cybercobra (talk)

It’s not likely that any of us has first-hand recollections of the Spanish flu. In the last 300 years, the world has seen nine flu pandemics, the most recent of which was in 2009 when the Swine flu featured the same strain as the 1918 flu pandemic. The two pandemics resulted in very different death tolls, however. In 1918, with a world population of about 1.9 billion, the estimated death toll was somewhere between 17 million and 19 million people. In contrast, in 2009 with a much larger world population, the pandemic from the same flu strain was reported to have a death toll of 150,000 to 575,000 individuals.

Are you among the millions who get vaccinated against the flu each year? If not, you can learn more about it from the CDC website.

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