On this day in 1918, the first cases of Spanish Influenza were reported in the US in Fort Riley, Kansas.

What's So Spanish About It? It was called Spanish Influenza since it was mistakenly believed that the strain originated in Spain.

From a Mountaintop High in Tibet... Spanish Flu actually originated in Tibet a year earlier. When the various armies moved across the continents, they carried the flu with them. Soon cases began to surface in Europe. The flu, which up until they point had been merely annoying, changed and became deadly once it reached France. African solders who had been recruited into the French army caught it.

Move Along... From France, the flu moved into Spain. Since Spain was a neutral player in the war, the government had no reason to downplay the symptoms. The Spanish press documented the illness fully.

How Deadly Was It? It was the most deadly epidemic to ever strike the United States. While America was preparing for war, a soldier at an Army fort in Kansas reported to the base hospital with flu-like symptoms. Before the year was out, 675,000 Americans would die from the flu ~ more than the total of all Americans to die in all wars in the 20th century.

Worldwide epidemic. The 1918 strain of flu created not just an epidemic but a global pandemic causing 25,000,000 deaths.

What the American Medical Association Said: "The 1918 has gone: a year momentous as the termination of the most cruel war in the annals of the human race; a year which marked, the end at least for a time, of man's destruction of man; unfortunately a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease causing the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all-infectious disease," (12/28/1918).