How Do You Understand The 1918 Flu Pandemic?
In the spring of 1918-near the close of the First World War -an influenza epidemic raged throughout army training camps in the U.S. At the time, no one recognized this small epidemic as the precursor to the great flu pandemic of 1918, which claimed between 20 and 40 million lives worldwide. Here’s a quick history of the deadliest contagion outbreak since the Black Death of 1348. Worldwide resistance was at an all-time low. Although the 1918 flu pandemic would have been deadly under any circumstances, the conditions that prevailed around the world after World War I-among them, starvation, incapacitation and sheer exhaustion-may have contributed to the high mortality. Essentially, having barely recovered from one disaster, the world was ill prepared for the next. Antiviral medicine was still on the horizon. In the early 20th century, doctors had few options for combating viruses. If the pandemic had begun with a small number of cases, it might have been possible to quarantine these patie
