The Great War’s greatest killer Laura Spinney on the Spanish flu, a pandemic that cut short more th

[TomSea]

The Great War’s greatest killer
Laura Spinney on the Spanish flu, a pandemic that cut short more than 50 million lives


Nurses care for victims of the Spanish Flu in tents at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1918

A hundred years ago, at the tail end of the First World War, a deadly new strain of influenza emerged that would infect one in three people. The ensuing pandemic cut short the lives of between 50 million and 100 million human beings. It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death of the 14th century, and possibly in the whole of human history.

The 1918 flu pandemic has been studied ever since it receded in the 1920s, leaving untold misery in its wake, and though scientists know a lot more about it than they did 100 years ago, many questions remain unanswered. Why was it so lethal? Why did it attack those in the prime of life – robbing families of their breadwinners and communities of their pillars? And could such a thing happen again?

A pandemic is an epidemic that encompasses more than one continent, or as in the case of the Spanish flu, the whole world. The flu pandemic that preceded the 1918 disaster swept the world in the 1890s, killing an estimated one million people. Of the three that have struck since 1918, none has killed more than two million people, so 1918 is an anomaly that needs explaining.

Read more at: https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/great-war-s-greatest-killer