John M. Barry, Distinguished Visiting Scholar, the Center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane and Xavier Universities, New Orleans, Louisiana, concluded that Haskell County was the location of the first outbreak of the 1918 flu pandemic (nicknamed "Spanish flu"), which killed between 21 and 100 million people. Dr. Loring Miner, a Haskell County doctor, warned the editors of "Public Health Reports" of the U.S. Public Health Service about the new and more deadly variant of the virus. It produced the common influenza symptoms with a new intensity: "violent headache and body aches, high fever, non-productive cough. . . . This was violent, rapid in its progress through the body, and sometimes lethal. This influenza killed. Soon dozens of patients—the strongest, the healthiest, the most robust people in the county—were being struck down as suddenly as if they had been shot." Barry writes that in the first six months of 1918, Miner's warning of "the influenza of a severe type" was the only reference in that journal to influenza anywhere in the world.