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The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including some 675,000 Americans,

lasting more than 12 months. Citizens were ordered to wear masks, schools, theaters and businesses were shuttered and bodies piled up in makeshift morgues before the virus ended its deadly global march.

Here are parts of an interesting article about this pandemic from our digital archives.

QUARANTINE LIMITATIONSDecember 17, 1918

Considerable discussion was started by an article appearing in the Scientific American last month, charging that Spanish influenza came to this country from Europe because of the laxness of American port authorities, who could, it was stated, have kept it out by a rigid quarantine. When a disease has wrought such havoc as this one has in America, any opening for fixing the blame is likely to be readily seized and this has been the case of the charges made in the Scien-tific American and followed up by a number of newspapers.

The weekly stated that those who duty it was

to enforce the quarantine laws new how serious the disease was because they had the European medical records to judge from. “The obvious thing to have done when the first ship with influ-enza patients on board cast anchor at a quar-antine station, was to isolate that ship until the slightest possibility of carrying infection ashore had been removed.

This read well but the Charleston Post asks will it stand analysis: In the first place, the influ-enza arrived while the nation was at the height of its war activities and ships coming from Europe were innumerable. Would it have been practical to hold every one of these ships in quarantine for a long period when not a minute could be wasted from the transportation of troops and supplies

back to Europe on those very ships? Is it easy to say quarantine a ship on which there is an influenza patient? Most doctors admit that it is often next to impossible to spot every case of the disease, so varied are its forms. “The man who is affected only to the extent of a slight cold may be a carrier of influenza in its worst form. Indeed, it is possible for one to be a carrier and show prac-tically no symptoms of the disease itself.”

“The fact is, no matter how rigid the quaran-tine laws nor how large and efficient the force charged with executing them, a pandemic of the nature of influenza probably cannot be kept out of a country like this by human agencies. It is one of the misfortunes that may almost be put in the category of inevitable.”