Flu: the Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That

Joyce Kao

BME 301-Richards-Kortum

9:30 A.M.-11:00 A.M.

Book Review of

Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

Everybody knows about AIDS, Ebola or the mad cow disease, so what is the 1918 influenza pandemic? In 1918, a devastating strain of the flu spread among the American population virtually overnight killing 40 million people. Less people have died from AIDS.

Flu by Gina Kolata explores the history of the 1918 influenza virus. It talks about the impact of the virus on the American population and the ever present fear of this particular flu strain making a come back. The book walks through a century of improving technology and how it impacted the search for the mysterious 1918 influenza virus. As the technology improved, the closer scientists got to isolating the virus. It was only in the last decade that the 1918 flu virus was isolated and partially sequenced. In addition to seeing how technology impacts science, the book also shows the impact of biotechnology on public health. It walks through the various attempts at making different flu vaccines.

Not only does this book examine the science behind the virus and vaccine, for those interested in the governmental policy side of public health, it also shows how the government handles a possible national crisis. The procedures, the meetings, the reasoning behind their decisions and the public’s reaction are all walked through in chapters five and six of the book.

The history of human subject testing is mentioned throughout the book. At the beginning of the century and the book, scientists could just haphazardly infect healthy individuals with an infectious agent to prove a point or do an experiment. As the book progresses so does the ethicalness of human testing.

Although the 1918 influenza is the main disease in the book, Gina Kolata also manages to incorporate relevant stories of other diseases into her book; from cholera, dysentery, swine flu to Asian bird flu. These sections are filled with interesting facts about the disease and are used to either illustrate the severity of the 1918 pandemic or to show how other scientists use ideas and techniques from dealing with one disease to a different situation with a different disease.

Flu is a must read for any aspiring disease detective. It is comparable to Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. The book is just as exciting, informative and will have you sitting on the edge ofyour seat to the end.