This year marks the 100th anniversary the influenza pandemic of 1918, known as the Spanish flu, that killed one out of every 20 people in the world and over 1,000 people in New Mexico.
As the flu swept across the country, officials in New Mexico tried to minimize the threat, thinking it might damage the booming tuberculosis sanatorium industry, which had enticed thousands of eastern Anglos to move to the state, according to a 2016 book, Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health by Nancy Owen Lewis.
