Gulf coast flu, 1918

There's a lot of good regional reporting around that most of us don't get to see. Consider the Sun Herald in gulfport, Mississippi. We think of Gulfport as Katrina country these days, but like the rest of the world in 1918 it was pandemic flu territory. Local reporter Kat Bergeron looked back nine decades to that other catastrophe and concluded there are still a lot of missing puzzle pieces.

Nearly nine decades after the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic swept across the Mississippi Coast - and every country in the world - researchers and health officials continue to study and revise death tolls.

Even less seems to be known about how many caught the flu and survived.

Statewide, the Mississippi Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Records, listed 6,219 deaths from influenza in 1918 and 3,013 in 1919, but researchers question the accuracy of record-keeping of that era, not just in Mississippi but across the country. Millions also likely died of flu complications, such as pneumonia. (Kt Bergeron, Sun-Herald)

Neither newspapers nor officials kept people informed.The paper's forerunner, The Daily Herald, was typical:

"Official information as to the number of cases of influenza occurring in the Mississippi Coastal District has been withheld heretofore because of the fear that a certain portion of the population might be tempted to become careless if on a certain day the number of cases reported by physicians should happen to be low.

"It is now believed, however, by health authorities that the people in general have by this time become sufficiently convinced as to the need of precaution, and that it is therefore safe to give figures." (November 1, 1918)

Except that they didn't, not even as they were saying it was permissible to do so. Current estimates are that Mississippi might have been suffering 6000 new cases a day at that time, although you'd never know it from reading the newspaper. But you'd know it other ways:

Are the memories of men like Tommie Dukes Sr., who has an oral history in Southern Miss archives, correct? As an adult, the National Negro League player born in 1906 and raised in the Kiln and Lumberton recalled the flu pandemic of his youth: "And every day they was hauling caskets from Bay St. Louis to the Kiln. You'd see them trucks coming there with caskets."

[snip]

Those who remained healthy still found their lives and mobility drastically altered. School classes were canceled and offices closed, some stores shuttered, especially on weekends, and church choirs fell silent. Hard-hit were the state colleges where panicked parents were not allowed to pull out students because of quarantines.

[snip]

As phone and telegraph operators fell to the flu bug, communication was hampered further; public services were curtailed. Most telling were signs posted on houses in the cities that complied with Frank's dictates. The signs read: "Influenza. Visiting forbidden to and from this house. U.S. Public Health Service."

And there were priorities:

In Mississippi, not all public gatherings were canceled as the surgeon general had dictated. There were fairs, rallies to raise money for U.S. involvement in World War I and a few religious conferences.

Coast communities did what they were asked to do, and Harrison County postponed its fair. Canceled war bond rallies were blamed for organizers not meeting patriotic donation goals, and, not surprisingly, the rallies were one of the first public events brought back.

Bergeron went to Deanne Stephens Nuwer of the University of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast, a scholar who researched the 1918 pandemic, to get the bottom line:

"The lesson we should have learned from 1918 is that there needs to be a more cooperative effort at health care. Each state and city was onto itself, even on the Coast, and the resources shared and the knowledge shared could have been so much greater."

If you look at the US pandemic flu plan, you get the feeling they should be reading the local press in Katrina country. Because they don't seem to have learned the lesson.