Private Glen Dale Harris, USA
Glen Dale Harris was born December 18, 1896 to William and Tampa Harris near Denton TX. By 1910 his family had moved to the eastern side of the state near Clovis NM where Glen’s father worked in a local grocery store. In June 1918 Glen registered for selective service. At that time he was living in Deming NM where he worked in a steam laundry operation. On August 28, 1918 Glen was inducted into the US Army and sent to the Student Army Training Corps, stationed at NM A&M College. In October 1918, Glen became ill during the height of the flu pandemic, eventually succumbing to pneumonia on October 17, 1918. He was 21 years of age. He was buried in the Mission Garden of Memories Cemetery in Clovis NM.
The Student Army Training Corps was a 60 day training camp established at colleges across the nation to augment the buildup of US Forces as the country entered the war. There were approximately 220 SATC ‘students” on the campus in the fall of 1918, far exceeding the college enrollment at that time. Seven young men from the SATC would die between October 15th and October 25th as a result of the flu.
Comment:
The 1918 flu pandemic was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus. It infected 500 million people across the world, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population—making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.
Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients; in contrast the 1918 pandemic predominantly killed previously healthy young adults. Modern research has concluded that theH1N1 virus kills through a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system). The strong immune reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths among those groups.
To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States; but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit—thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu
This pandemic has been described as "the greatest medical holocaust in history" and may have killed more people than the Black Death. It is said that this flu killed more people in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. The majority of deaths were from bacterial pneumonia, a secondary infection caused by influenza, but the virus also killed people directly, causing massive hemorrhages and edema in the lung. The unusually severe disease killed up to 20% of those infected, as opposed to the usual flu epidemic mortality rate of 0.1%.
The outbreak is thought to have begun in January 1918. However by August 1918 the virus had mutated into the more deadly form. The greatest death toll in the US occurred near the end of October 1918.
(This information extracted from Wikipedia)