Mark opines: "Oddly, enough the Spanish Flu was named after Spain even though it originated in Kansas."
Maybe, . . . maybe not.
There's speculation as to the origin-site of the 1918 Flu Pandemic.
Fr'instance from National Geographic :
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Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic.
Historian Christopher Langford has shown that China suffered a lower mortality rate from the Spanish flu than other nations did, suggesting some immunity was at large in the population because of earlier exposure to the virus.
In the new report, Humphries finds archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu.
[ or ]
A decade after the war, Kansas was identified as another possible breeding ground, due to reports of an influenza outbreak there that spread to a nearby Army camp in March 1918, killing 48 doughboys.
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n.b. There's other speculations in the National Geographic piece as well.
