Worldwide Perspectives on the Spanish Flu
The Spanish Flu has been described as, “the largest outbreak of any infectious disease known to medical science”. American historian Alfred Crosby comments “nothing else has ever killed so many in such a short period”. The flu appeared in the final stages of the First World War, arriving in three waves between the spring of 1918 and the winter of 1919.
The plague arrived in the spring of 1918 and by the time it had run its course an estimated one hundred million would lie dead (the number of casualties vary from study to study from fifty million to one hundred million) (Barry, 2006). Many places throughout the world in 1918 did not keep mortality rates, so the exact figure will probably never be known. Even in countries such as the United States, where medical records were kept, efforts to estimate the death toll is difficult as there was no definitive test to show that a person had the flu. We do know that this outbreak was 25 times more deadly than ordinary influenza, killing 2.5 % of those infected (Kolata, 1999). |
The numbers of deaths for Spanish Flu outnumber those of
the First World War (Foley, 2011). The mortality
figures, shocking as they are, do not describe the full horror of the outbreak.
Usually influenza kills the older and youngest members of the population,
however the 1918-19 pandemic took young men and women in the prime of life,
those in their twenties and thirties. It is estimated 8-10 % of all young
adults then living may have been killed by the virus (Barry, 2009).
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