In spring of 1918, the soldiers of Fort Riley started report illness, feeling achy and feverish. This outbreak was first recorded in Haskell County, Kansas and quickly began to spread throughout military forts by transfer of soldiers and from their exploded into a world wide pandemic. This was just the beginning of one of the deadliest disasters in human history. Coming at the end of World War I (1914–1918), influenza shadowed wartime routes across oceans and continents, causing at least a quarter of the global population to fall ill and killing approximately fifty million people in about eighteen months. This number surpassed that of the twelve to sixteen million wartime fatalities. The influenza epidemic came with out warming on a world …show more content…
Lastly the third wave strain had weakened but still lethal in early 1919. An Estimated twenty-five million people fell in in the United states and 675,000 died. The pandemic was so deadly that in 1918 it reduced American life expectancy statistics by twelve years. This pandemic brought with it tensions between medical staff and the public, as well as tensions between governmental authority and their governing body. These tensions created a lack in trust that could be used as a learning base for future diseases and catastrophes.
The origin of the influenza of 1918 has long been debated. The predominant theory is that it first appeared in the American Midwest in March 1918 and spread to soldiers in camps across the U.S. where medical officials reported high rates of influenza but few deaths, as previously stated. The virus then made its way to Europe to the Western Front where in May and June it sickened thousands of soldiers but killed few in this first wave. In the harsh conditions of trench warfare the virus flourished, possibly mutating into an especially contagious strain that exploded to create a global catastrophe in August 1918. This leathal second wave of influenza appeared in Boston, Brest France,