UPS trucks to serve as death carts, which ferried the dead to the mass graves that were hastily dug in city parks. Countless bodies remained unclaimed or undiscovered. “We in this city will not be divided by fear,” she said. “Philadelphia is still and always will be the city of brotherly love. That is who we are. No matter what you read on the internet or who somebody wants to blame, our job is to love our brothers and sisters, to comfort them in this time of tribulation, to unite our community. Remain calm, open your hearts, aid the needy, and we will get through this together.” The mayor inspired Philadelphians to rise to the challenge by volunteering in local hospitals and helping with the grim task of disposing of the dead. She set an example by tending the homeless, who were disproportionately affected by the new plague.
Mayor Jackson’s death from Kongoli flu, ten days into the epidemic, was a demoralizing blow from which the city never fully recovered. And the contagion spread.
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A FARMER IN ARKANSAS died of Kongoli. Not much was made of his death at the time. He was a scoutmaster in a little mountain town, and he had taken his troop on a weekend trip to Little Rock, so it was thought that that was where he contracted the disease. But none of the scouts became ill. It was a week after his death that the CDC learned that what the farmer farmed were chickens. An alert went out to health officers around the country to be alert to infections in domestic fowl.
Mary Lou Shaughnessy was a field veterinarian with the regional U.S. Department of Agriculture office in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her job was to ensure the health of exportable farm animals. An entire industry can go down in an instant. When mad cow disease was found in a single Holstein in Washington State in 2003, more than thirty countries immediately halted imports of American beef. Minnesota was especially sensitive to the issue of avian influenza, since the state was the leading producer of turkeys in the entire country—nearly fifty million birds in six hundred farms around the state. Minnesota also happened to be a major stopover for migrating birds on the Mississippi Flyway, which reached all the way from the tip of Canada, on the Arctic Ocean, to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana.
Mary Lou rode out on Route 23 with her partner, Emily Lankau, the state veterinarian. The two women had teamed up before, and they volunteered for this trip to spend more time together. They had both been in a cappella groups in college, and they loved to harmonize on road trips. They were headed to Kandiyohi County, the center of the turkey industry, where the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N2 erupted in 2015. It was likely that the domestic fowl got the disease from migratory birds coming from Asia. More than 48 million turkeys died or were exterminated.
They drove past grain silos and railroad crossings. There wasn’t much to see at this time of year. This part of Minnesota is flat, fertile land, but the fields were still fallow in March; it would be another month before corn and soybeans would go in the ground. “We may as well do the Stevenson place first,” Emily said.
“Get it over with, you mean,” said Mary Lou.
Mr. Stevenson—neither could remember his first name—was a tricky case. He was one of the largest farmers in the area, but he was also part of a militia group, known as the Minnesota 3 Percenters, a name drawn from the assertion that only 3 percent of American colonists took up arms against the British Empire during the American Revolution. The group was best known for bombing a mosque in Bloomington, although Stevenson was not indicted in that incident.
It was easy to spot the gate to his farm by the upside-down Stars and Stripes on the flagpole—a signal of distress that annoyed nearly everybody in the county. Stevenson made it clear he didn’t care. He was a survivalist who homeschooled his children, so there was little interaction with the outside world in any case.
Mary Lou pulled up to the house in a white Ford Explorer with the USDA logo plainly emblazoned on the door. She and Emily got out of the truck wearing their cheeriest expressions. Stevenson was already standing behind the screen door.
“Mr. Stevenson, how are you today!” Mary Lou said. She had been raised in the South and