Private William Louis Dotson, USA
William Louis Dotson was born March 21, 1900 in Gila NM to Charles and Mildred Dotson. His youth was spent in western New Mexico where his father was a hardware salesman. He was their only son. He attended Silver City Schools and was attending New Mexico Normal School in Silver City, where he was a prestigious athlete, when he registered for selective service on September 21, 1918. On October 1, 1918 he was brought into the US Army and assigned to the Student Army Training Corps at New Mexico A&M College. Just 12 days later, on October 13, 1918, William became ill during the height of the flu pandemic, eventually succumbing to pneumonia on October 21, 1918. He was 18 years of age. His body was transported back to Silver City where he lies buried in the Silver City Masonic Cemetery. Shortly after his death, his family moved to Los Angeles where his father became active in the real estate business.
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. Section A of the SATC was especially close to the campus in both home of record and age and those that died in the flu pandemic from Section A were included in the campus honor roll published in the 1919 Swastika. 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)