Flu : The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I have read in a while!
Review: Flu by Gina Kolata is one of the best-written, most interesting books I have read in a long time. It is an exciting history of the 1918 influenza pandemic and the science behind its subsequent explanation. I originally purchased this book because it was offered at a discounted price and looked (based on the cover) interesting, not because I had any special interest in epidemeology or the author. Now, after reading Flu, I would like to know more about both!

The story of the 1918 flu pandemic is frightening. Reading about it left me pondering the same question posed by the author to herself in the opening pages of her book: I am a scientist, I have taken a college microbiology class, so why haven't I heard about an illness that killed 20 million people (at least) in the span of a year? This flu, after mildly foreshadowing its presence at the close of the 1917-1918 season, struck hard over the course of a few weeks in the fall of 1918 and continued its march around the world for the rest of the season. It affected everything about people lives that year, from where it was legal to cough to who was able to at least put men on the field of the War to End All Wars.

The subsequent history of trying to explain what happened in 1918 is also compelling. Several interesting personalities are involved, each in their different fields trying to shed new light on the old story-- virologists infecting pigs and ferrets, molecular biologists trying to get DNA from long-stored tissue, physicians trying to recover frozen virus in Alaska and a Canadian geographer with a talent for drawing media attention to her work.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with eyes. Its only possible shortcoming may be in the cursory explanation certain technical aspects receive. However, if readers don't already know a little about molecular biology (including DNA/viral replication and PCR), it is worth having to do a little research to get up to speed.

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Summary: Fascinating, Riveting Cautionary Story About The Flu of 1918
Review: I happened upon this intriguing well-written book after finishing Laurie Garrett's wonderful exploration of the emerging microbiological threat in "The Coming Plague", and was fascinated by what I discovered in this book regarding the specifics of the most famous flu outbreak in modern times, the great world-wide flu epidemic of 1918. Nothing in recent experience, not even the AIDS epidemic, has prepared the American people for the awe-inspiring possibilities that such a rapid and devastatingly virulent flu outbreak could present to us in the new millennium, and the author details the terrifying consequences of the outbreak of influenza in the months after the end of World War One that left over forty million people and traumatized the nation.

Indeed, according to author Gina Bari Kolata, the flu of 1918 was the single most dangerous flu epidemic of the 20th century, a plague so virulent it literally boggles the imagination of anyone more familiar with the yearly onset of Asian influenzas, which we may consider to be annoying, off-putting, and sometimes reason for hospitalization, but hardly the stuff of widespread death and disability. Yet in a single year it struck down more people world-wide than any known before it or since, and scientists now believe it had an usually provocative combination of natural properties in terms of its DNA that made it uniquely dangerous in terms of its threat to human beings.

Yet, in spite of its historical dimensions, relatively little is known about it, and it is a little discussed and curiously mysterious area of modern history. It is only within the recent past that a dedicated team of biological scientists have been able to attempt to unlock the secrets associated with this influenza breakout by researching the influenza's DNA sequences and associated biological properties using tissue samples recovered from victims and preserved over the decades since. The author describes this attempt to uncover the truth about the 1918 flu epidemic in terms of a riveting detective story, at the same time masterfully weaving the details of the pathology of the disease itself and the devastating impact of the killer epidemic into the narrative.

Included here is an absorbing and personalizing discussion of the social, economic and cultural effects of the epidemic, told in a compassionate and quite humane fashion, and it composes a disheartening look at the facts surrounding the way the influenza struck otherwise healthy twenty to forty year old citizens with such devastating results. People getting on the New York City subway at one end feeling slightly under the weather actually transpired on board before being able to reach their chosen destinations.

What is truly frightening about this well-told cautionary tale is that both the author as well as public health officials warn that another such appearance of a similarly virulent pandemic flu outbreak is not only possible but is in fact probable. Such an outbreak could appear, literally without warning, in any given year. Moreover, the resources needed to successfully combat another such influenza outbreak are not immediately available. Indeed, without a massive change in public policy and a quite rapid public health effort to develop the capability to isolate initial victims as well as to innoculate the population at large with a hastily conjured vaccine, the disastrous history of the 1918 epidemic could well be repeated with horrific results in our lifetime.

Rating:
Summary: mediocre extended newspaper article, now dated
Review: This is not a book about 1918. This is an over-hyped and overlong newspaper story about digging up bodies and trying to recover the 1918 virus from them. It's now (June 2004) much dated, which is what happens to newspaper stories.
If you want to read an actual book about the epidemic-- and about much more, including contemporary science, the virus, the interplay between politics and the disease-- then read The Great Influenza by Barry. Now THAT is worth picking up. I gave that 5 stars, and if I could give it more I would.