It is difficult to understand everything that happened in Epidemic 1918 flu – known as “the Spanish flu”, the virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed between 20 to 50 million victims, more than all the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I.
While the global epidemic lasted for two years, a large number of deaths were massed in a particularly harsh three months in the fall of 1918, and historians now believe that the deadly danger of the “second wave” of the Spanish flu was caused by a mutated virus that spread through troop movements in wartime. This came, according to History website.
When the Spanish flu first appeared in early March 1918, it bore all the hallmarks of seasonal influenza, albeit a highly contagious and virulent strain, and one of the first cases recorded was Albert Getschle, a US Army officer at Camp Funston in Kansas, who was hospitalized with a fever .
The virus had spread rapidly through army facilities housing 54,000 soldiers, and by the end of the month, 1,100 soldiers had been hospitalized and 38 had died of pneumonia.
And when American forces deployed in large numbers in the war effort in Europe, they brought with them the Spanish flu. During April and May 1918, the virus spread like wildfire across England, France, Spain and Italy.
It is estimated that three-quarters of the French army were infected in the spring of 1918 and up to half of the British forces, however, the first wave of the virus does not appear to be particularly fatal, with symptoms such as high temperature and malaise usually appearing for only three days, according to health data. The limited public at the time, the death rates were similar to seasonal influenza.
The reported Spanish flu cases decreased during the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus was over. In the past, it was just the calm before the storm. Somewhere in Europe, a mutant strain of the Spanish Flu virus appeared that has the potential to kill a healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of the first signs of infection..
In late August 1918, military ships left the English port city of Plymouth, carrying soldiers unknowingly infected with this new, deadliest strain of Spanish flu. With the arrival of these ships to cities such as Brest in France, Boston in the United States and Freetown in West Africa, the second wave of the global epidemic began..
“The rapid movement of soldiers around the world was a major cause of the spread of disease,” says James Harris, a historian at Ohio State University who studies both infectious diseases and World War I. The materials in crowded conditions were definitely a tremendous contributing factor in the ways the epidemic spread. “
By December 1918, the second deadly wave of the Spanish flu had finally passed, but the epidemic was far from over. A third wave erupted in Australia in January 1919 and eventually made its way to Europe and the United States, it is believed that President Woodrow Wilson contracted the Spanish flu during the peace negotiations of World War I in Paris in April 1919.
The death rate in the third wave was just as high as the second wave, but the end of the war in November 1918 removed the conditions that had allowed the disease to spread so far and rapidly. The global deaths from the third wave were, while still in the millions, pale in comparison to the appalling losses during the second wave.
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