People are still nervous about Ebola. For sure, it is a deadly and contagious disease, and one that has to be stopped before it ravages any more communities. In comparison with some of the pandemics of history, however, this current outbreak doesn’t seem quite so bad. There have been much more deadly, and much more contagious, diseases throughout history.
There’s one virus in particular that most people in industrialized nations nowadays don’t really worry about anymore: the flu. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 was a deadly pandemic, and one that organizations that study infectious diseases are still learning from. Forget Ebola…this stuff was worse.
The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 is one of the deadliest and most wide-spread pandemics in all of human history.
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The so-called “Spanish Flu” is believed to have originated in the trenches of WWI. It is also theorized that the flu was a relative of a flu strain which was brought to the Western Front by Chinese workers who had picked up the strain that had devastated the Shanxi Province.
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Soldiers who had contracted the flu, brought it home with them when they returned home from the war. This was the beginning of the pandemic.
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As the flu spread, so did rumors. Lack of information (and lack of doctors due to the war) left people without much knowledge of how to deal with the flu, or how to stay safe. Quarantines were one of the main sources of prevention.
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As the flu spread, it also mutated – from it’s more benign form, to a vastly more deadly one which could infected anyone whether they were old or young, weak or healthy.
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At the end of the pandemic, the flu had killed more people than died in WWI.
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In America, 615,000 died from the flu – worldwide, the number of deaths reached 50 million. A third of the world (500 million) were infected.
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(via: allday.com)
So, the next time you hear fear mongering on the news, remember: humanity has been through much, much worse. (But you should still probably pick up some hand sanitizer that smells like peppermints. It’s flu season, after all.)
