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1918 flu pandemic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920)[1] was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus (the second being 2009 flu pandemic). It infected 500 million[2] people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—3 to 5 percent of the world's population[3] at the time—making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.[2][4][5][6] To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States;[7][8] but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII), creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit—[9] thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu.[10]
Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill juvenile, elderly, or already weakened patients; in contrast the 1918 pandemic killed predominantly previously healthy young adults. Modern research, using virus taken from the bodies of frozen victims, has concluded that the virus kills through a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system). The strong immune reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths among those groups.[11]
Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify the pandemic's geographic origin.[2] It was implicated in the outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s