Kristina Herrndobler Hearst Newspapers Nov. 13, 2005 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - During the seven years that John Barry spent researching his book on the 1918 flu epidemic, he had no clue that the finished book would pick up an endorsement from President Bush and become the talk of official Washington.
In the wake of the publication of The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, Barry has testified before Congress and has briefed Michael Leavitt, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and other top health officials about the lessons learned from the 1918 global outbreak.
Barry's timing is perfect: His publication timetable coincided with the current outbreak of bird flu in Asia and Eastern Europe that has public health officials hunting for historical precedents to learn how to fight flu pandemics. advertisement
Barry speculates that the 1918 pandemic, or widespread epidemic of flu, emerged during World War I at Camp Funston, Kans., an Army training center that held 56,000 troops in close proximity during one of the coldest winters on record.
The infection moved with the American troops to other sites but soon became known as "Spanish flu," very likely because only Spanish newspapers were publishing accounts of the spread of the disease. Spain, which was neutral during the war, didn't have the newspaper censorship that other nations did, according to Barry.
As many as 50 million people died from the flu around the world, including some 500,000 deaths in the United States.
Barry's description of the most deadly pandemic in modern history has become the worst-case scenario for public health officials tracking the current spread of bird flu.
Bush, asked about avian flu at an Oct. 4 news conference, replied: "I am concerned about avian flu. I tried to get a better handle on what the decision-making process would be by reading Mr. Barry's book on the influenza outbreak in 1918. I would recommend it."
Barry, testifying recently before a Senate committee, praised Bush's proposed $7.1 billion pandemic preparedness plan as "sound." It is "a very good place to begin," he told the lawmakers.
The plan would invest in new vaccine technology, stockpile antiviral drugs and vaccine and help states formulate their own preparedness plans. The plan is currently being considered by House and Senate committees.
Barry said the United States is currently unprepared to cope with a pandemic and that the government should have been planning for another pandemic once the 1968 avian flu pandemic ended. The two most recent pandemics in 1957 and 1968 were destructive, killing more than 100,000 people combined in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But they were not quite the devastating disease that the world faced in 1918.
"Symptoms could be horrific," Barry told the Senate panel, referring to Spanish flu.
"People turned so dark blue from lack of oxygen a physician reported he had difficulty distinguishing between black and white patients. Victims could bleed from their mouth, nose, ears, and eyes."
Will the current H5N1 strain of avian flu, which has killed 64 people and is still mostly an animal disease, turn into a 1918-type killer?
Barry said some similarities between the 1918 strain and the current strain exist, but it is impossible to know if H5N1 will cause a pandemic.
What is almost certain, he said, is that there will be more worldwide outbreaks of flu in the future.
The book was a long time coming, said Barry, who is a visiting scholar at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane and Xavier universities.
Barry said there were days he became so frustrated that his research was taking so long that he wanted to through the project out the window.
"When I started it, I thought it would be a relatively easy and fast book," he said. "I was confident I could do it in two and a half years. But during the seven years it took, sometimes I wished I'd never started it."
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