Actually, for the record, the term “Spanish Flu” was a misnomer; the 1918 pandemic is thought to have originated in the Spring of 1918, in Kansas, at a military cantonment called Camp Funston. WWI did not end until November 11th, when Armistice was signed with Germany.
Some scholars have theorized that the flu probably originated in the Far East.[13] Dr. C. Hannoun, leading expert of the 1918 flu for the Institut Pasteur, theorized that the former virus was likely to have come from China, mutated in the United States near Boston, and spread to Brest, France, Europe’s battlefields, Europe, and the world using Allied soldiers and sailors as main spreaders.[14] Hannoun considered several other theories of origin, such as Spain, Kansas, and Brest, as being possible but not likely.
Historian Alfred W. Crosby observed that the flu seems to have originated in Kansas.[15] Political scientist Andrew Price-Smith published data from the Austrian archives suggesting that the influenza had earlier origins, beginning in Austria in the spring of 1917.[16] Popular writer John Barry echoed Crosby in describing Haskell County, Kansas as the likely point of origin.[17] In the United States the disease was first observed at Fort Riley, Kansas, on March 4, 1918,[18] and Queens, New York, on March 11, 1918. In August 1918, a more virulent strain appeared simultaneously in Brest, France, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in the U.S. at Boston, Massachusetts. The Allies of World War I came to call it the Spanish flu, primarily because the pandemic received greater press attention after it moved from France to Spain in November 1918. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship.[19]
Investigative work by a British team, led by virologist John Oxford[20] of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the Royal London Hospital, has suggested that a principal British troop staging camp in Étaples, France was at the center of the 1918 flu pandemic, or was the location of a significant precursor virus.[21]
[edit] Mortality