As many American soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu as were killed in battle during World War I. Children were left orphaned and families were devastated. Carson the butler, the Countess of Grantham and Lavinia Swire (played by Zoe Boyle) all. An estimated forty million people died as the epidemic raged. This century’s most popular depiction of last century’s catastrophe was certainly Downton Abbey on PBS. Readers may squirm during Spinney’s long final section-an insightful description of the subsequent century, during which researchers have teased out the Spanish flu’s cause, developed a marginally effective vaccine, and worked to ameliorate future influenza epidemics, which are inevitable. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic felled the young and healthy virtually overnight. Medical science helped only modestly, as political considerations (including wartime censorship), tradition, and racism all trumped safeguards, as when authorities in several countries stopped the publication of details on the epidemic’s spread. Spinney’s book contains vivid journalistic accounts of outbreaks around the world, from the U.S. Unlike ordinary influenza, this variant tended to kill young adults, sparing children and the elderly. But it returned in autumn, far worse and deadlier. Symptoms (including fever, headache, cough, and body aches) were miserable but rarely fatal, and the number of cases declined over the summer. It is now generally accepted that the first case of Spanish flu occurred in an American military camp in March 1918.

In 1918, the Italian-Americans of New York, the Yupik of Alaska and. This is no longer a controversial assessment, notes science journalist Spinney ( Rue Centrale) in an often disturbing account that begins in prehistory and continues to the 21st century. Buy a cheap copy of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and. The deadliest event of 1918 was not the continued fighting of WWI but the Spanish flu, which affected one third of the world’s population, killing over 10% of its victims.

Pale rider the spanish flu of 1918