The World's Deadliest Epidemics by Goldstein Jack;Taylor Frankie; & Frankie Taylor

Author:Goldstein, Jack;Taylor, Frankie; & Frankie Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: zika, black death, plague, virus, epidemic, pandemic, london, great plague, cholera, mesoamerica, population collapse, asian flu, great dying, 1918, spanish flu, hiv, aids, ebola
ISBN: 4678012
Publisher: Andrews UK Ltd.
Published: 2016-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Cholera is caused by drinking water contaminated by human faeces

The 1918 Flu Pandemic

What we call today the 1918 Flu Pandemic actually lasted from January 1918 until December 1920. Some five hundred million people across the world became infected with the H1N1 influenza virus, in a time where that represented over a quarter of the planet’s entire population. An estimated one hundred million people - around five per cent of all humans on earth - died as a direct result of the virus.

The very nature of human existence had changed significantly during the nineteenth century, with the industrial revolution leading to much greater population concentrations than the semi-rural existence most had previously led. This meant that illnesses were already spreading quicker then they would have done a few generations ago, helped by unsanitary conditions and only a basic level of understanding regarding disease prevention. Then came the Great War. Trench warfare meant large groups of people breathing stale air, living in conditions that would shock anyone from the modern age. By 1918, the world had been ravaged by more than three years of war, and populations had already suffered from deaths in battle on a scale previously unseen. All these conditions meant a perfect breeding ground for a deadly virus.

Sometimes the 1918 pandemic is referred to as the Spanish Flu. The reason for this is that early reports of the spread of this particularly harsh strain of influenza were censored by wartime governments in Britain, Germany, France and the United States. After all, what terrible effect on public morale would the announcement that thousands of soldiers were dying of non-battle-related causes have? Yet the papers were perfectly able to report the situation in then-neutral Spain, which therefore for many years was the country most associated with the virus, even though it was neither where the outbreak originated, nor the worst-hit territory.

The cause and initial location of the outbreak has been argued over for many years, with scientists proposing various theories as to where it started. Today, using a number of techniques (including the analysis of the bodies of frozen victims) it is thought that the most likely origin was a troop staging and hospital camp in the port town of Étaples in France. Here, a virus that previously affected the avian population mutated to infect pigs that were kept there. As pigs and humans are extremely close biologically speaking, the influenza quickly spread to humans where it encountered very little resistance; people’s immune systems had simply never experienced such a virus, and could not cope with its aggressive nature.

There were theories, mostly now discredited, that the pandemic actually started in the far east, imported to Europe by Southeast Asian soldiers. Others also looked east but to the tens of thousands of Chinese labourers employed to work behind the European front lines. Another proposal was that the virus originated from China, but came through Boston, with sailors as the initial carriers. Yet the most recent investigations, one in particular published in

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