The Spanish flu pandemic lasted from February 1918 to April 1920. It infected 500 million people, about a third of the world’s population. The death toll is typically estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million. Malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene, all exacerbated by the recent war, promoted bacterial superinfection.
About Spanish flu in brief
The Spanish flu pandemic lasted from February 1918 to April 1920. It infected 500 million people, about a third of the world’s population at the time. The death toll is typically estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million. Malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene, all exacerbated by the recent war, promoted bacterial superinfection. The 1918 Spanish flu was the first of two pandemics caused by H1N1 influenza A virus; the second was the 2009 swine flu Pandemic. Although its geographic origin is unknown, the disease was called Spanish flu from the first wave of the pandemic. In Spain itself, the nickname for the flu, the \”Naples Soldier\”, was adopted from a 1916 operetta, The Song of Forgetting, after one of the librettists quipped that the play’s most popular musical number, Naples Soldier, was as catchy as the flu. Other terms for this virus include the \”1918 influenza pandemic,\” the 1918 flu pandemic, or variations of these. The pandemic is conventionally marked as having begun on 4 March 1918 with the recording of the case of Albert Gitchell, an army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, despite there likely having been cases before him. The disease had been observed in Haskell County in January 1918, prompting local doctor Loring Miner to warn the US Public Health Service’s academic journal. Within days, 522 men at the camp had reported sick.
By 11 March 1918, the virus had reached Queens, New York. It reached India, North Africa, Japan in May, and soon after there had been recorded cases in Southeast Asia in April. After the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, Germany started releasing Russian prisoners of war, who then brought the disease to their country. In Senegal it was named ‘the Brazilian flu’, and in Brazil ‘the German flu’, while in Poland it was known as ‘the Bolshevik disease’ Today, however, ‘Spanish flu’ is the most widely used name for the Pandemic in Spain. It then spread to the rest of France, Italy, Spain and Spain and in Great Britain. After an outbreak in China in June, it was reported in June and July 1918 that the disease had likely gone around the world as far as Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia. The first observations of illness and mortality were documented in the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized these early reports. Newspapers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the name \”Spanish flu. Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify with certainty the pandemia’s geographic origin, with varying views as to its location.
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This page is based on the article Spanish flu published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
