How the 1918 Pandemic Revolutionized Virology
In 1918, epidemic disease and war once again embraced with all their old passion. The deadly pandemic that began that year became known as the Spanish flu because Spain was a neutral country, and its press was the first to report the devastating outbreak. The warring countries meanwhile suppressed the news, leaving their citizens unprepared. This flu was particularly terrifying because it spread so easily and because it concentrated its venom on the young. (Their elders may have acquired immunity from exposure to a previous flu outbreak.) It filled up its victims’ lungs with fluid, and the desperate hunger for air turned their skin blue as they suffocated.
The first of three waves hit soldiers in France early in 1918. But the flu soon spread from there, in two subsequent and far more virulent waves, to sicken soldiers and civilians almost everywhere. Over the course of two years, it infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, a quarter to a third of the human population, and killed 50 million of them, with most of the at this writing—under 10 percent of the current human population.)
