Spanish flu killed 100 million.. and we’re not doing enough to prevent another outbreak
This winter has been hit by one of the worst flu outbreaks for years, with hospitals running out of beds as the NHS struggles to care for more than 4,000 victims each day.
The virus has killed 215 people in the UK since October, with dozens more left fighting for their lives.
In January, at the peak of the outbreak, more than eight million people were suffering from symptoms. It is a reminder how deadly flu can be. But to fully appreciate the carnage it can cause, you have to look back a century to the Spanish flu pandemic that swept the globe in 1918.
Experts believe that outbreak killed up to 100 million people – five times as many as the First World War and twice as many as the infamous Black Death.
One of the world’s leading flu experts is now warning a similar pandemic could begin “tomorrow” and kill 33 million people in 200 days.
Jonathan Quick, chairman of the Global Health Council and a project leader for the World Health Organisation, has written a new book, The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It.
Giving a stark warning, he said: “With disrupted supply of food and medicines, and without enough survivors to run computer or energy systems, the global economy would collapse.
“Starvation and looting could lay waste to parts of the world.
“It’s a disaster movie night. Yet it is waiting to come true thanks to influenza, the most diabolical viral killer known to humankind.
“The conditions are right – it could happen tomorrow.
“The good news is that there is much we can do to prevent this.
“The bad news is that much of it is not being done. We are just as vulnerable now as we were 100 years ago.”
Experts agree Spanish flu, caused by the H1N1 strain, was the deadliest disease in history, but there are conflicting theories about how it began.
Some believe its source was China, yet the most widely accepted view is that it started in America, spreading from birds to pigs and then humans – much like the swine flu epidemic of 2009.
The first cases are believed to have been in Haskell County in Kansas during January and February 1918.
Unlike most types of flu, which are deadliest to children and the elderly, strapping farmers in their prime were struck down as if they had been shot.
Those who seemed fine and healthy at breakfast could be dead by tea time.
The first officially confirmed case was exactly 100 years ago this weekend, at US Army base Fort Riley, where cook Albert Gitchell was taken to the infirmary with cold-like symptoms.
Within hours, 107 men had fallen ill. Several days later, that figure had risen to more than 500.
Yet no measures were taken to contain the disease – a fact that was later blamed for the eventual pandemic.
When soldiers moved to other bases, then to the front line of the Great War in Europe, they took the disease with them. The hospital at the British Army base at Etaples, northern France, became a flu epicentre as the men lived in overcrowded tents with poor sanitation.
By the end of the war more than a million men had passed through the camp’s “Bull Ring” training ground, carrying the disease to the trenches and back to Britain.
Army physician Professor Roy Grist wrote in September 1918: “When brought to the hospital, patients very rapidly develop the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen.
“Two hours after admission they have mahogany spots over the cheek bones and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis [blue skin because of a lack of oxygen] spreading all over the
We’ll have another flu epidemic. What isn’t predictable is its severity DR GREG POLAND EXPERT AT MAYO CLINIC
face. It is only a few hours then until death comes and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible.” Fame and fortune offered no protection. American silent film icon Harold Lockwood was killed by the disease in New York in October 1918. Diplomat and Tory MP Colonel Mark Sykes died in his hotel room in Paris after falling ill while helping to negotiate peace treaties in February 1919. His descendants allowed scientists to open his coffin in 2007 to check if any flu particles had survived for study. Prime Minister David Lloyd George survived Spanish flu, as did US President Woodrow Wilson, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and a young Walt Disney. But London hospitals, already struggling with war casualties, were overwhelmed.
Medical schools stopped their classes and sent students to help on the wards.
Theatres, dance halls and churches across the country were shut for months to stop the flu spreading. Streets were sprayed with chemicals. Some factories even relaxed no-smoking rules, believing cigarettes would ward off the virus. People were advised to: “Wash inside the nose with soap and water each night and morning; force yourself to sneeze night and morning, then breathe deeply. “Walk home from work and eat plenty of porridge.” Living under constant threat from the disease, children even composed a new nursery rhyme to sing as they jumped over the skipping rope. It went: “I had a little bird, it’s name was Enza. “I opened the window and in-flu-enza.” In America, morgues quickly filled up and towns struggled to find places to store bodies. The only way to avoid the virus was to sever all contact with the outside world. Australia introduced strict quarantine controls and one village in Alaska took even more extreme measures.
Pathologist Johan Hultin, who spent years studying Spanish flu, said: “The elders stationed armed guards at the village perimeter with orders to shoot anyone who tried to enter. The village survived unscathed.”
But not even a remote location was a guarantee of safety. By the time the pandemic ran its course in 1919 the tiny Pacific island of Western Samoa had lost one fifth of its population.
The virus spanned the globe, but it became known as Spanish flu because the neutral country’s newspapers devoted pages of coverage, especially after Spanish king Alfonso XIII was struck down by the disease.
British, French, German and US newspapers avoided reporting on it for fear of undermining wartime morale. Experts believe conditions are now ripe for a new pandemic just as deadly.
There has been a rise in the proportion of diseases that cross over from animals – 75% of new infections during the past decade have come from animals and these mutated conditions are harder to contain and treat.
The growth of international travel also means a new virus could spread far more rapidly around the globe.
And while modern medicine has progressed with vaccinations and ventilators to keep patients alive as they struggle to breathe, hospitals could not treat patients fast enough if the virus infected as many people as Spanish flu.
Dr Gregory Poland, an expert in viruses at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said another global flu crisis was “100%” certain. He added: “We will have another pandemic. What’s unpredictable is the severity of it.”