Minding Your Business; 395; Gail Darling Staffing

K-R-W-G-TV presents Mining Your Business, a look at the people, places, events and issues that impact the business and economy of Southwest New Mexico, with your host, Charles Comer. Hello and welcome to Mining Your Business, to show where we explore business, economic development, community resources and events, and issues that impact our region. This week on Mining Your Business, she's a successful business person who's been involved in community and business organizations for more than two decades in El Paso. Here to share her experiences and her expertise is the former president of the Border Business Association, Gail Darling. Gail, thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you. Glad to be here. And especially thanks for driving up from El Paso, that can be a little rough this time of day. And it's still hot out on the roads. This show is going to probably air in November, but

when we're taping this show, it's very warm today. So let's start out finding out a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, where you went to school, and also a little bit about the organization, or actually not the organization you came to represent, but a little bit about your business. Well, I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. in the city, had a wonderful childhood, didn't know that everyone didn't have the museums and so forth, that I always went to on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday afternoon. Later in my young adult life, I moved West, and sort of the old story, the car broke down in El Paso, and that's where I ended up. So I've been here 26 years. Did that literally happen, your car actually broke down? But something may just stop, and something may just stay. I was transferred here with the temporary help service out of Houston, Texas. I had a very short stint with them, and they said, we'd like you to go to El Paso, Texas to open up a brand new

market for us. I had to look on the map to find out where El Paso was. I was thrilled to know that it was right next door to New Mexico, because I'd always been intrigued with New Mexico. And 26 years later, I'm here, I have a family, I raise my kids, and I love it. Tell us just a little bit about your kids, how many ages that kind of thing? Well, my children are young adults now. They're my son's 23, and he's working in living in Houston, Texas. I graduated at the University of Texas Austin, and my daughter is 21, and she goes to the University of Texas Dallas, and she did attend NMSU for a semester, so she loved it here. Well, fantastic, and I as well have an adult daughter, so whether a lot better in El Paso than in Houston, my sister lives in Houston, and works for a theater company there, so especially now things are quite a mess, she still doesn't have power. So, and again, we're taping this in September, airing it in November, but I had mentioned

you own and operate your own business with the home office in El Paso, and so tell us a little bit about Gail Darling's staffing, tell us how it came to be, what drove you to even start your own business so many challenges with that? Well, I think it's a great story. I was working for a corporation who placed temporary help, and as I mentioned earlier, I was transferred to El Paso to open up a new market. We were very successful in that market, and I operated it for four years, and I literally woke up one day and said, gee, they sent me here to open up the market, that I did, it was successful, I was the manager, I hired all the local staff, I trained all the local staff, I went out and sold the business, why can't I do this for myself? And I determined that the only thing standing in my way was money to start a business. So, this was a long time ago,

banks weren't so willing to lend money to women, even if they had a good business plan, and a good financial statement. So, I did what everyone tends to do when they go to the place of last resort, I called mom and dad, and I said, I need a very small loan, I know I can do this, I've done it before, and I'll write out a document that says, I'll pay you back, I gave him 10% interest, and I paid back the full amount in 18 months, and opened up Gail Darling's staffing. Well, let's hear it for good old parents. So, right from the starting block, you had to deal with a pretty serious gender issue, their gender discrimination issue. How did that make you feel? Well, it was tough, but quite frankly, it wasn't something I wasn't used to before coming to El Paso in Washington, DC, I had a job, I was a manager of a company, and I went to get a car loan, and I was an older adult, my older 20-year-old, I think I was 27

or 28 at the time, had the job four or five years, couldn't get the loan unless my father co-signed it because I was a single woman. So, I was used to this. I don't really know how to respond to that, because my mom was very strong and had great credit, but one thing she always feared was not having her, my father's name tied to hers because of all that, and just because of the cloud you have out here in Western civilization. Now, you started your own business, so you basically had all the puzzle pieces in the box, and so what happened from there? Take us from step one, mom and dad lent you the money. What was the next step? Well, advertising, I came up with a campaign myself. Of course, you have limited funds. It's an interesting time in the Southwest, even now, a lot of business deals are built on relationships. You can actually call a person

and ask for time to speak with them. It's not so in some of the bigger markets, they don't have any time for you at all. And that's one of the nice things that I love about this region. So, that got me into offices in front of the right decision makers. That on top of my limited marketing, one door at a time, one customer at a time, one day at a time, and the first year, we were modestly profitable, and the second year we were wildly profitable, and I was well on my way the third year. And it was because every single day, I woke up, I had a strategy, I had a plan on who I was going to talk to, who was going to call on. I worked every hour of the day, all day long, it was broken down, but by what I was going to do this hour, that hour, and the next hour, and I stuck to the plan. I'm curious, what advertising venues, what kinds of advertising did you

use with such limited funds? Well, joining the Chamber of Commerce, joining committees in the Chamber of Commerce, I became a walking billboard, advertising in the Chamber of Commerce, annual directory. They had, and back then, again, this is 22 years ago, they had neighborhood papers, they had benches, benchads, were very successful for me 22 years ago. Nobody had ever heard of Gail Darling, it was a catchy name, and I had my name on benchads all over the city, and in Las Cruces, and it caught on, you know, who's the Gail Darling person, you know, and again, I wasn't afraid to call on people, and I think coming from the East Coast, I knew that that's what you had to do every day, and sometimes I'd walk into offices, and they'd go, well, who are you, and what do you want, and golly, where'd you come from? You know, you're different. And I said,

yes, and let me tell you about my company, and I used that to my advantage. Now, there are other 10 services out there. What that have, that are successful, successful in this area. What sets your business apart from other staffing firms, just to sort of make the point that that's how you survive in competition, is somehow find that edge that cut above. What's yours? Well, let me tell you first a little bit about what is a staffing service. We literally rent people out. It's like renting a typewriter. Legally, yes. And we rent them out by the hour, just like a typewriter might, well, a computer now, I think I'm aging myself. But we rent people out. Now, that's a broad brush. You can rent out a secretary, you can rent out a janitor, or you can rent out someone, a nuclear physicist. So in the staffing industry, a staffing service determines which slice of the pie of employment they want to be active in. Okay. So Gail Darwinian staffing

has evolved over the 22-year period of time. When I first started, I sent out receptionists and secretaries to fill in for vacation and holidays. Very similar to manpower. Exactly. Throughout the years, I started supplying people to the manufacturing industry, and whole companies would, would, quote, rent hundreds of people from me to manufacture items, both in Southern New Mexico and in El Paso. And I have now evolved one more notch to, I place very, very high-level administrators on government contracts. Some of them are sophisticated, some of them are high-end administrators. And then I have biochemists. I have biological monitors. I have PhD candidates. So in moving myself into a different slice of the employment market, I distance myself from a lot of the competition. It takes a lot of time and effort to understand how to place a nuclear physicist,

for instance. I kind of want to follow up with that. But I wanted to let you finish with your chain of thought. And most large staffing services don't want to spend the time to figure it out. Well, I do. The competition is less. The profit is higher. And the rewards are terrific. For instance, after Katrina, I was asked by a large contract to find an individual who had a certain certification who could go in to New Orleans and determine whether it was fit for human life. And I found that person in 24 hours. How do you do something like that? How do you find people who are so specialized? Certainly the web, email, cell phones, technology these days, communication technology has to assist in that. But it still takes some pretty serious networking. How do you find these really high level scientists and very specialized managers?

It's exactly what you said all the above at all times and it is an art form. I'm here to tell you that recruiting and searching is an art. And it's, who do you know has a science degree? I mean, this sounds so simple. But it can be more sophisticated. Who do you know whose father's a PhD in anything in science? And you start neck right. You call them up. Who do you know here? Who do you know there? And you're unpeeling an onion. And finally, you get to the core where your man is or your woman is. It's just a long process. Now, that's certainly so by being flexible, doing research, and not being afraid to try something that others consider too hard to do. Right. And that has been consistent day in and day out. I mean, you have a large, you're affiliated with the government. You have contracts with the government.

No, no, I understand as far as client confidentiality and those kind of things you may not be able to share. But you said, physicists, you sent an analyst to Katrina. What are some of the other fields? Well, currently, I'm on a very large contract at Fort Bliss trying to help the soldiers. And I have another contract that's going to do a lot of work on the border. I can't really divulge it right now because it isn't completely firm, but I'm working toward that. And some of these are federal contracts. Some of these are, I might be a subcontractor to what they can call a prime contractor who actually has the contract with the federal government. And so they would sub to someone like me to actually do the work. And so, and not to mention businesses. I mean, I still place people and businesses, administrators, accountants, secretaries, receptionists. I still do that all over the place and in seven different states. I place

individuals that process medical claims in their homes. They're very sophisticated processors and they're all set up in their homes. Facts machine, computer, and a multi-line phone. That sounds like about what you need to office from home. And I know I'm actually in the works hopefully can bring someone from Fort Bliss on, but things are really ramping up there for future combat systems. And I'm only speculating, but I'm guessing you're probably having something to do with the upshot of, that's not actually the right word, upscaling of staffing it at Fort Bliss. Let's talk about challenges running your own business. I'd like to talk about more like some of the nuts and bolts and then some of the family stuff. Well, I'd like you to add on the end, how do you raise two great kids who made their way through college on on top of all of that,

but but let's start with with some very specific things that challenge you in your business, challenge your profit margin, those kind of things. Well, that's a great question and I'm really glad you asked because when I went through my university training, believe it or not, I was a studio art history, I was a studio art major and I minored in art history. What does that have to do with business? So there's a lot of people like that out there. They find themselves in business or wanting to go into business and they don't really have the skills to operate a business. I learned a lot from trial and error. If I had done things the proper way and I was smarter about it, I probably would have saved myself a lot of heartache and I recommend anyone who's interested in going into business, a small business, contact the small business administration immediately. They have programs, they have classes, they have mentors, they have teachers,

they have everybody you need and everything you need to start your business and understand what it's going to take because your business is a living organism almost and there are requirements that are both state, local, federal laws that you must follow, taxes you must pay and various forms and one needs to understand everything as well as accounting. You know, you can balance your checkbook, everybody thinks they can go into business. It gets very sophisticated as your numbers get higher and bigger and bigger. So that was a challenge. Training myself had to really operate the business, getting the right education, taking the seminars and talking to other people, the CPA, the attorney when you had to talk to an attorney on a legal matter because there's so much out there that a person has no depending also on their business that they're going into, whether they have regulation that's required or not. Your regulation challenges aren't the same

as someone who may sell liquor or control substance. But you have to know it and the state and the federal government are unforgiving if you don't know it and you make a mistake and there's financial penalties and sometimes worse. I always think that if it's only about money, it's okay. You can pay a penalty. But if you know this stuff going in and if you understand that you have to know what going in, you'll be a much better business person. Balancing family and running your own business. I for a short time wasn't entrepreneur. Had a housekeeping business single owner operator and everyone I met that were also entrepreneurs said work for yourself, work 120 hours a week, work for a company, work 40 hours a week. And that certainly puts challenges on a social life, on a family life. How'd you get through that? Interesting. As I mentioned, I've been in business 22 years. I started with a file cabinet and now I'm ending with a blackberry in my hand. That means I have freedom. I didn't have the

freedom when I was raising the children that I have today and I wish life would have been different back then. I can take my I can be anywhere with my laptop and I can be in my office. My office is where my laptop is open. And where there's a Wi-Fi connection? And where there's or a satellite. You have satellite now that you can hook into your computer. Often you need electricity if your battery goes down. But it was challenging but it was also good. I was able to take them to soccer practice. I was able to do more things at someone who had to be in an office 8 to 5. I had staff that could back me up. I think it's a great way to go for someone who does want to stretch themselves a little bit more. Yes, there are weeks you work 80 hours. Yes, you go to meetings at night. Yes, you wonder why am I here. At a meeting that you think, gee, I need to be home cooking dinner. But your children fall into a pattern.

And they know that mom is here or there and they get used to that. And it's the only thing they know. So what they don't know any different. No, we've probably got about three minutes left in the interview. Touch for about a minute on your virtual offices. You used to have a physical office in Albuquerque no longer. You know a virtual office. What is that? Well, that's technology finally promising and getting what we want in the world. I can be in any state. I can be in any country and I can do business as long as I understand the laws and the regulations I must follow through my computer. You don't have to have brick and mortar anymore, especially if you're a small business person. I'm on my kitchen counter in the morning pouring coffee and I'm getting emails that I'm responding to from the east coast. And they don't know that I'm on my kitchen counter. They don't know where I am and I don't know where they are. And so it's so beautiful that now

technology. It's a great gift. It's a great gift. We've gone to blackberries now so I can be walking to my car and getting a very important email that I need to respond to rather than waiting the 20 or 30 minutes that might take me to get back to my computer. So I can respond right then in there. These are the black, blackberry or the iPhone or any of these handheld devices. And it's great. It cuts overhead. It cuts expenses and it really gives you freedom. Now let's close by talking about giving back to the community. So many businesses do that because they feel they get from the community. It's time to give back. Tell us about your wounded soldiers program that you began. This is a program I started three years ago. My family has not been in the services for some reason. Historically we've been the ones that have always been left in the country, you know, keeping the country going throughout history. And I noticed that these soldiers were the same age as my son. And I needed to do something. So I started talking with them

and I said, you know, what sort of challenges are you having? And they said, gee, and it was coming up and it was about in the summer. And they said, yeah, I want to go home for Christmas. I don't know if I can afford it. I said, well, what do you mean? And we got to talking. I have lots of business friends. They travel all the time. They collect frequent flyer miles. I started going to my friends and saying, why don't you give me a ticket? I want to send a soldier home for the holidays. I had a couple of frequent flyer mile tickets. Next thing I know it was a ground swell. People started inundating us with frequent. I started, I put together a committee. I got the sergeant major on post. I met with the soldiers. We greeted them. We'd give them welcome packages at Fort Bliss. And now we're in our third year. Last year we sent 55 soldiers home for the holiday. And I have to tell you, the first year on Christmas Eve, I'm making dinner for my family and getting ready for our activities. And I get a phone call in the middle of the afternoon.

And this voice says, in a very weird kind of childish way, is Gail Darling there. And I thought it was a prank call. I was about ready to hang up. And I said, this is Gail Darling. She says, I just want to thank you for sending my daddy home for Christmas. Oh, okay, I'm going to try not to cry, but you know what, we're going to have to leave it at that. Gail, thanks for sharing your expertise and coming in. Thanks for what you're doing for our troops. See, make me cry. I still do that. You should have seen it. It's time again for our weekly piece here on Mining Your Business. That showcases some of the hardworking entrepreneurs and business people in our area. We call it the NYB Local Business Feature on the road in Al Mugordo. My wife's parents live up in high rolls. And we actually, my wife saw a poor sales sign for

then called Still Nature's Pantry and decided very quickly, actually, that we would purchase the store. When we started the store back in September of 01, we actually bought the store with next to nothing in the way of inventory. And we started basically with an empty shell down there with empty shelves and started ordering what the customers wanted. There was a philosophy of mine is basically doing and getting what we can for the customers, being very proactive in bringing in the products that the customers wanted. And we built the business up in that way. There's two main focuses here with the store. It's selling the nutritional supplements and selling groceries. We also do a lunch bar here that people really do like. They like to be able to come in, sit down, get a good salad, sandwich, soup, browse around, do their shopping.

It really makes it a very comfortable atmosphere to be able, almost like a homey thing, where we know the names of the customers. Where we can sit down if a customer is eating and talk with them, stand at the bar and chat with them, open up some books to help them on what health issues they're dealing with. Even speaking with customers about personal issues, to give in here to them and to really be a friendly place. So we're very proactive as well in customer service. Some of the specific things that they will find here in nature's pantry when we get into the supplements. Glucostomines, because people have so many joint problems. Glucostomine does very well. Alphalipoic is one that maybe not be moving very quickly, but it is a very good antioxidant, good for people with blood sugar levels, flaxseed oil. That just is a continued good steady

seller. It works well, it's good for you, good for the brain. We have a freezer that's stuffed full. We've got like 12 total doors of our frozen in this little space, and that's a lot of frozen foods. I do enjoy doing this. It is something that I'm not a person that would just sit behind a desk. I like to have my hand in different aspects of the business, everywhere from sweeping and mopping, to making the financial business decisions. There is many rewards when it comes down to that. That just about does it for this week. If you have a question or comment about the show, you can call them in your business hotline at 646-730 or email me at Charles Comer at Yahoo.com. For information on upcoming shows and an archive of past shows, you can log on to

www.krwgtv.org. Again, I'd like to thank my guest, Gail Darling, of Gail Darling's staffing in Opasso for coming on the show. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Charles Comer, here's hoping you have a great one. Coming up next on Secrets of the Dead, 1980, a deadly flu circled the globe. She sat down on

the curb. She's burnt in blood and she died the next day. Up to 50 million victims were left in its wake. Is today similar avian strain poised to become the next global killer? It could be 10 or 15 million people dying or will a genetic breakthrough help prevent a pandemic? Killer flu on Secrets of the Dead. Secrets of the Dead was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.

In the fall of 2005, epidemiologists, doctors, and scientists found out around the globe trying to battle alarming cases of deadly influenza. Unlike the more manageable strains of the human influenza virus that caused sickness each flu season, these cases were caused by lethal avian flu strains that have been crisscrossing Asia and making their way into Europe. At present, the bird flu strains called H5N1 do not pass readily from birds into people or from person to person. What we're seeing now with the H5 is the infection of a small number of humans with a virus that's really adapted to birds. We know this is a very virulent virus when it gets into people. But the lucky thing for us is that this virus has not figured out how to be transferred from one person to another. So for this virus to become a pandemic, what needs to happen is not only the ability of the

virus to replicate or make copies of itself in human lung tissue, but then to be spread person to person in droplets the way a human flu virus is spread. There are signs that some strains of the H5 virus may be mutating in that direction, but it is too early to tell whether the mutations will lead to a pandemic. A little virus so fragile you can destroy a washing up fluid, 30,000 of them sit on a pin's head and yet it's got eight genes and yet it can get up your nose, get into your throat, go down your lung, get you into bed and kill you. Structurally, influenza is a simple organism, a collection of just eight gene segments, but it can mutate endlessly, circumventing our bodies' attempts to stop it. Different strains spread each flu season, but only every 30 years or so does a mutation result in the creation of a super virus, a pandemic strain that spreads virulently

and challenges our immune systems beyond their ability to protect us. Three such strains have cropped up in the past 90 years, and many believe that with H5, we are poised for a fourth. People think of viruses I think, ah, HIV, that's an important virus, you know, that's spreading around the world, that's killed 20 billion people. But I can tell you that if we had another influenza pandemic and we will have another influenza pandemic, it will make the HIV outbreak almost look like a technique. One only needs to look back to the pandemic of 1918 for precedent. That year, influenza swept around the world in three deadly waves. It began like ordinary flu, with aches and pains, but it ended horribly. Its victims drowning in their own body fluids, their faces marked by a strange blue cast. It was the worst pandemic in the world's history, even more lethal than the Black Death.

Through four years of battle, World War I killed eight and a half million soldiers. In a matter of months, the flu claimed many millions more. Where did the 1918 virus come from? And why was it so deadly? The answers may not only put to rest one of history's great puzzles. They may provide the roadmap for surviving the next deadly pandemic. The 1918 virus was a naturally occurring disease. It spread around the world, caused a pandemic and maybe killed 50 million people. And as we face the fear of a new pandemic with the HIV virus, we really need to understand this process. How do viruses adapt to humans? Why do they cause disease? Why are they lethal? Unless we study the 1918 virus in the laboratory, we're never going to get at those answers. The race to crack the genetic code is a race against time. For if we are unprepared when the next pandemic takes hold, it could wreak more havoc and cause even more death than the 1918 strain. I think the worry is that because of mass transit,

now the ability of jumbo jets to carry large numbers of people from continent to continent on a daily basis, then you would find that wood such a virus emerged today might spread much more rapidly than it has in the past. But if the origins and makeup of the 1918 flu can be explained, would it give scientists new insight into how to stop a modern pandemic? Ultimately, I think the most important thing to learn from the 1918 pandemic is try to establish the rules of how pandemic viruses form. These viruses can move around and adapt to new species as hosts. If we can use the 1918 virus as a model to understand this process of how a bird virus adapts to humans, we could use that information to prevent something like this from ever happening again. More than 80 years ago, when the 1918 pandemic first hit, there was no warning. Europe had endured four years of fighting. Fresh blood was on its way to the front.

German troops were marching in from the east. And from the west came the Americans. The United States had finally joined the Great War. People who were very happy, they just thought Americans were going to go and when the war and come back home and live happily ever after. Of course, it didn't happen that way. Though no one knows for sure, it's long been assumed that this flu began in America. On March 11, 1918, at Camp Funston in Kansas, 100 soldiers mysteriously fell ill during training. They complained of headaches and sore throats, symptoms often attributed to the common cold. A week later, the camp hospital reported 522 cases.

An American origin is entirely credible, a large number of the recruits that were in military camps, including Camp Funston, were very raw individuals, people that came from a rural background that had not been exposed to urban diseases and had not acquired the level of immunity as their urban counterparts. Suddenly the young men began to die. That spring, 48 soldiers would succumb to what camp doctors termed pneumonia, but which was, in fact, the first wave of the worst influenza outbreak the world had ever seen. 80,000 Americans crossed the Atlantic in March, with nearly 120,000 more to follow in April. Was it coincidence that when they arrived in Britain, so did the flu. The large-scale rise in influenza incidents in the British Isles occurred when it was clearly

on the wing in America. It was a three-day flu. I remember laying on two kitchen chairs, not carrying whether I lived or died. Now deemed the three-day fever, the flu spread around the world, but it soon got a more exotic, if somewhat misleading name, the Spanish flu. In Spain, 8 million were sick, including the King. In this neutral country, there was no censorship, news traveled faster. This was a wartime situation in which all of the presses of the combatants were heavily censored. The British press included, but the Spanish press was not. And many of the stories that were originating during the first wave were coming from Spain of this catastrophic new disease that was sudden in its onset and that was very, very dangerous.

Just where the flu came from was quickly lost in the turmoil of war. A German offensive had smashed through the French lines. As the Allies fought back, influenza moved freely between the Americans, French and British. On the British home front, the flu was having a crippling effect. Phone networks broke down, transit all but came to a stop. Unitions factories were hard hit. In Manchester, England, the city's medical officer James Niven was overwhelmed by the outbreak. He had rid the city of tuberculosis, cutting its death rate in half,

but faced with this new infection, he was suddenly bewildered. The epidemic is increasing rapidly. The worst I have seen in my long experience. There were some who simply blamed the enemy. There were a number of arguments that this was somehow German biological or chemical warfare that had been imported into the British Isles by German spies and that had been unleashed into the atmosphere. This was seen as another aspect of German barbarism and yet another weapon in the German arsenal. But the Germans were also suffering. By June, the flu had reached epidemic proportions among their ranks. In Britain, the disease seemed to follow the lines of the railways,

appearing first in the seaports, going on to peak in London, and then spreading out to neighboring cities and beyond. Those in the country were especially hard hit. July the 19th, 1918, death of another Flint, sojo. Sergeant Barrett, age 28 of Lake Villas, Gressford, died of pneumonia whilst on leave. In rural Flintshire, England, amateur historian Mary Moore has charted the disease's progress. Among the dead were Mary's own family. My mother's first husband died just after they'd been murdered. He was very strong physically. He was cultured. I don't think he'd ever had an illness and yet he was the one that developed the flu. I think there was a feeling of great frustration that men who'd actually survived the war

should then die of the flu. It went like a scourge through these rural areas around here. There were cases of small boys that were playing football on Sunday, who were dead on Wednesday. There are reports of a brother dying today and a sister dying on Thursday and a child dying on Friday. In Manchester, James Niven was horrified and helpless. At one school, I observed the children falling ill. They simply dropped on the desk like a plant whose roots have been poisoned. The attack being quite sudden and drowsiness a prominent feature. And then, just when they seemed to be at the breaking point, the first influenza wave fell back.

It was high summer. Like a reaper, the disease had circled the globe, cut a swath through humanity and retreated. For the moment, the war effort could resume and the killing on the front lines could continue. What no one could know was that this was just the beginning. That the war would enable the flu to return in a far deadlier form. There was a kind of symbiotic relationship that developed between the war and the pandemic. It certainly created an epidemic- conducive environment. After years of food shortages and anxiety and strain and shortage of medical personnel, and overcrowding and vast movements of populations on an unprecedented level, it's clear that the environment was very much conducive to the flourishing of a pandemic.

Within weeks of the first wave of influenza receding, the second one hit. Overnight, it appeared in three continents, in Boston, Massachusetts, in France at breast, and in Africa at Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, and now the disease had become even more devastating. In September near Boston at Camp Devons, the death toll reached 100 soldiers per day. The camp's medical staff was overwhelmed. Every morning, the bodies, the corpses were stacked up like cordwood in the morgue and in the hallway outside of the morgue that they did, thousands of autopsies just in this one camp. It's hard to imagine the conditions under which these pathologists had to work.

They had never seen anything like this. People described that this must be some sort of plague was a term that was used, that they were harkening back to the black death of the medieval ages, that that was the only analogy one could use for something so devastating, so that it was really an unbelievable situation. Adoptus recognized there was something new. They'd seen influenza before, but here there was something extra. There was like a virus with extra punch. And then they picked out what seems to be a unique feature of that outbreak. This is what's called this heliotrope cyanosis, this discoloration of the face, the ears. Cyanosis happens when the lungs are so desperate for air that they sap oxygen from blood vessels in the face. Heliotrope cyanosis was coined to describe the precise coloring on the faces of those who

died in the second wave of flu. Blueish tones so distinctive that the British army employed an artist to depict them. And doctors like James Niven noticed another disturbing trend. This flu was targeting the young and the healthy. Frequency of death presents a striking peak at ages 25 to 34. This is totally unlike the behavior of flu in previous pandemics and requires special study. Young adults and children seem to be much more susceptible to be infected with the virus, and then for whatever reason, young adults rather than children were highly susceptible to die. We don't know what influenza viruses circulated before 1918. We don't know what the immune status of the population by age was to different kinds of influenza viruses, including the kind that

emerged in 1918 as this managed flu. But I think there's pretty good evidence to allow us to conclude that there must have been an influenza virus of a similar nature that circulated in the mid-1800s so that people who were middle-aged and elderly probably had at least some protection against the 1918 virus. In four years of war, death had become commonplace among soldiers. Now, it was an everyday occurrence amongst civilians. I was out with my mom's shopping and I said to that lady, it doesn't seem well there. She said, don't watch her. And I said, but she's sweating. She sat down on the curb because she was poorly and she coughed so she's dirty blood and she died the next day. Well, I was very upset because she was only a young woman. As things got worse, there were calls for doctors to be released from active service to deal with

the crisis. The shortage of medical men is scandalous and disgraceful. It is time more doctors were sent home from the front. They are fighting a forward home as deadly as the hunt. People are dying off like sheep. In the United States, the situation had turned desperate. Even though 200,000 recruits had been hit by the flu, moves to quarantine the camps were rejected. The war demanded reinforcements, no matter what the cost. Part of the tragedy of the pandemic as far as America was concerned was that it raised this enormous army. And many of their troops never even saw the front line in the First World War because so many of them died on their way over. You were more apt to die aboard a US transport or in a US base camp and then you were in the actual firing line. By August, a quarter of the million Americans a month were on their way to Europe.

But by the time the troops from the Tennessee National Guard arrived in the French port of Brest, there were already casualties. When many of these transports reached Brest, which was the main port of disembarkation, invariably there was a convoy of ambulances there to meet them to take off the dead and the suffering from the pandemic. Those who survived were sent into battle. The Germans would later claim that the flu came with them as an unwitting ally. By then, the Germans had retreated to the Rikaval tunnel, part of a system of strongholds in northern France known as the Hindenburg Line. They had transformed the tunnel into a vast underground fortress. Losing to the Americans here could lose them the war. The very nature of the site has led Robert Brown to consider whether the flu adult Americans might have infected the Germans in the midst of battle. Just being here, we get the sense of confinement

and enclosure. We don't feel a gusts of air or the the free circulation of air. And once a disease is introduced in that environment, you can imagine it would sweep through here like wildfire. To seize the tunnel, the Americans had to fight their enemy hand to hand. It was a desperate battle and for the Germans, defeat was doubly catastrophic. The Hindenburg Line collapsed and the new wave of influenza took Germany in its grip. At least one German medical officer is noted as saying that it was the American army that introduced the epidemic in this tunnel and the German troops that contracted it ultimately brought

it back to the German homeland. Where ever it came from, within a month, flu was killing 500 people a week in Berlin. The German high command had to accept that the war was lost. When the armistice came on November 11th, the world rejoiced. At 11 o'clock, we had a great big bang. And then it said to my mother, what's that she said, keep calm. And then we heard the town cry telling us the war was over. Erah! You know it's over, yes, the war is over. The relief of knowing that the war was over and finished was absolutely terrific. People went wild in the streets and apartments or whatever.

But relief was mixed with foreboding. The specter of influenza still hung in the air. For many, the peace brought no release from the pain of losing loved ones. I do remember very clearly being with my mother and saying it's over, it was finished. Your daddy won't be going away again. Ada Darwin's father had served throughout the war as a medical orderly. Now he was back home in Manchester. Ada was one of six children and shortly after the armistice, the first to become ill. I remember crying to tell my mother to stop the others making her noise and making her head ache. And she put me to bed. And I wondered why she put me in her bed and not where I used to sleep with my sister. Within hours, Ada's mother and baby brother also came down with the flu.

To try to isolate the infection, the family doctor moved Ada from the house. It would be the last time she would see her mother. She looked very sad when I was being dressed to go. I thought she was sad because I was leaving her childish thought. By the next morning, Ada's mother was dead. I remember being on auntie's knee crying for my mother. And she said to God to Jesus. I remember saying that Jesus had lots of other people, I remember. And there was worse to come. Her father had also fallen ill. A medical orderly, he knew the disease's symptoms and what would follow. So they remember him going around the bedroom saying goodbye. I'm sure he must remember when I helped him.

The funeral when it came was for three people. Ada's father, her mother, and her baby brother. They were buried with military honors. I remember the band and then the body of soldiers marching. The death coffin and the union flag all lit. He's capped on the top. And the big glass first with the black horses. It's just like a film in my head. I can always see it. Almost every day I get letter from someone describing how their grandparents died or their favorite cousin. You know, 80 years later they're remembering it. So fantastic impacts at the time. In a country, in a world that was just reeling from the First World War. And they took it quietly. They're really dead. 7th of November 1918.

In the 96 great towns in England and Wales, there were 7,417 deaths compared to 4,482 the previous week. The death toll was mounting and science had no answers. The reaction to the outbreak from the medical community in general, the clinicians and the pathologists, was just one of total loss. If you put this into context, you can understand why it was so particularly frustrating. By 1918, people felt that great strides had been made in fighting off infectious diseases. And so it was a really huge blow to the morale of the medical community that advances of the last 50 years had all been seemingly worthless. But they were not able to do anything about this. It was not unheard of to find large numbers of unburied dead even in the streets that had been uncollected by sanitation officials. The public services broke down in many communities because of the number of people that were ill.

There was very much a climate of fear. And fear turned to panic. Remember at times when I'm under wear a mask and you could see her fright. You don't soon forget that. It stays deep within you. When things got very bad, they would run out of the city into the country. But the country here wasn't any better than the city here. They didn't know where the board was coming from. Recent death. Dr. Zdain, this is dying. Everyone is ill. Schools are closing, factories are closing. The whole one of society finds itself grinding to a halt. You can't buy coffins. You can't get your parents or your children buried. In 1918, flu was thought to be produced by bacteria, which can easily be seen through a microscope.

It was not until 15 years later that the disease was first identified as a virus, thousands of times smaller. And we now know that the virus didn't originate in humans. Influenza originated as a bird virus. It still is a particular virus of birds. Sometimes it kills them. They drop out of the sky like lead balloons. Sometimes it has no effect whatsoever in them. But they're excreting virus in large quantities in their droppings and through their upper airways. Flu strains rarely jump directly from wild birds to people. Typically, they must first infect domestic birds like chickens, then cross the species barrier into mammals such as pigs, before they are capable of human infection. Far East were known recent flu pandemics of originated. Food markets regularly bring humans, birds and other animals cheek by jowl.

Ideal circumstances for the virus to exploit. Influenza is fully dependent on its host. It survives and thrives only by invading cells and reproducing itself inside them. Without cells to infect, it would die within hours. What the virus does is it acts like a little terrorist. It gets inside the cell and then it takes over the machinery of the cell. It redirects the cell to change from its normal function to become a little virus factory. And as it reproduces itself in humans, the virus continues to mutate. Each time maximizing its chances of defeating the body's immune system, its genetic structure makes it uniquely well equipped to do so. The virus has only eight genes, but they are not locked in a fixed structure. They exist as separate fragments, so the virus can change its permutations endlessly.

And some scientists argue, even cyclically. This means that a new strain, with similar genetic characteristics to the 1918 strain, could therefore emerge. And since scientists do not yet know what the 1918 virus looks like, the world would be unprepared for its present-day equivalent. From his lab at the U.S. Armed Forces Pathology Institute, Jeffrey Tobinberger knew that to head off or repeat of 1918, he would have to find the genetic code of the killer virus. For the past 150 years, U.S. Army doctors have stored samples of disease tissue in the Pathology Institute's archive, especially when a disease tests the limits of their knowledge. Among the 70 million samples are 100 slivers of lung tissue taken during autopsies of U.S. soldiers who died in 1918. Finding them gave Tobinberger hope.

I was really surprised to find that there were approximately 100 autopsy cases of U.S. soldiers that died of influenza in 1918 in the files, so I had no idea that there would be so many. Most of the samples came up negative for the virus. It had escaped its victims before they died of secondary infections, but Tobinberger was undaunted. We were just so convinced that this was such an important attack that we just really kept at it even though we kept getting negative results. Finally, after months of searching, Tobinberger found fragments of the virus in a tissue sample taken from the body of U.S. Army Private Roscoe Vaughn. When we got the first positive case, it was just really a fantastic moment. It's one of these rare things that happened in science to be able to read a very tiny fragment of this virus that killed 50 million people and knowing that we were the first people on Earth ever to have come close to identifying this virus and actually seeing this virus up close. To boost the limited size of his sample, he used a new scientific technique called polymerase chain reaction or PCR.

You can theoretically start with just one copy, one piece of genetic material, and make multiple copies in a sense like making multiple copies of a piece of paper on a photocopy machine. And it allows you to go from material that is so limiting that you wouldn't be able to study it at all to having enough material that you can actually manipulate in a laboratory. Tobinberger's team then examined tissue samples from other parts of the world that contained the 1918 virus. Amazingly, the exact same strain cropped up in each sample, indicating to Tobinberger that the virus had not needed to mutate as it jumped from population to population. What it suggests to me is that this new virus emerged with all the features necessary to allow it to spread efficiently in humans, that is that large sections of population didn't have immunity to it, that it was supremely human adapted, that it replicated well. You