1918 Flu facts
While investigating facts about 1918 Flu, I found out little known, but curios details like:
The 1918 flu pandemic is often called the Spanish flu because Spain didn't fake and minimise the data about the dead like Germany, Britain, France and the USA.
During the 1918 flu pandemic the Governor of American Samoa John Martin Poyer quarantined the territory. American Samoa was one of the few places in the world to not suffer any flu deaths.
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 50 of the best facts about 1918 Flu I managed to collect.
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In 1918 World War 1 censors minimized early reports of the flu epidemic's death toll to maintain wartime morale. Newspapers in neutral Spain were free to report on the epidemic's effects, creating a false impression that Spain was the hardest hit, and giving rise to the name "Spanish flu".
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The 1918 worldwide epidemic was called the Spanish Flu not because it originated there, but because Spain was one of the few countries not censoring and suppressing news media during WWI.
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During the 1918 flu pandemic, 62 Boston prisoners volunteered to be injected with infected tissue and sprayed with infectious aerosols with a promise of release if they survived. All of the prisoners lived, but the ward doctor died soon after.
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Maintain morale, WWI wartime censors blocked early reports of the 1918 Influenza epidemic in their countries. However, papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain, creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit—thus the pandemic's nickname, the Spanish flu.
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The 1918 flu was recreated from a victim found in the Alaskan permafrost. Monkeys infected with the flu strain had classic symptoms of the 1918 pandemic, and died from a cytokine storm - an overreaction of the immune system. This helps to understand why healthy individuals died from the flu.
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In 1918, during WW1, there was a flu pandemic that killed 50 to 100 million people, all across the world. To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States.
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During the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, the Girl Scouts helped by cooking and delivering meals to patients throughout the city. They are credited with saving the lives of people too poor to afford doctors and preventing malnourished children from succumbing to influenza.
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The 1918 flu pandemic is said to have "killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century."
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The 1918 Spanish Flu killed so many people in the US that it caused the average life expectancy in males to drop from 48.4 to 36.6 and 54.0 to 42.2 in females between the years of 1917 to 1918.
De-extinction is scientifically possible. Several viruses have already been brought back, including the 1918 flu pandemic virus - source
The 1918-19 flu epidemic killed more people than ww1 in half of the amount of time. - source
Influenza virus A (H1N1) was the type responsible for the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 (between 50 and 100 million people died) and the Swine Flu pandemic in 2009 (as many as 579,000 people died).
Philadelphia is home to mass graves filled with bodies of 1918 flu victimrs - source
The flu pandemic of 1918 to 1919 also called as Spanish flu, occurred after World War-I, it was the deadliest in modern history, it killed more people than WWI infecting about 500 million people worldwide, that was about 30% of the planet’s population, and killing about 20 million to 50 million
The deadliest month in US history was October 1918, in which the Spanish Flu killed 195,000 Americans. The flu would go on to kill 675,000 Americans and 25-100 million world-wide.
The Spanish flu of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, is believed to have originated in Kansas.
A city in Alaska, called Brevig Mission, which lost 72 of its 80 residents in 5-days in 1918 during the 1918 Spanish Flu.
The 1918 Spanish flu "death spike" may have mostly been from aspirin. Aspirin overdoses mimic the symptoms of a severe flu.
The Spanish Flu epidemic, which killed 3-5% of the earth's population between 1918-20, vanished from the world suddenly, with 4,597 people dying, for example, in a Philadelphia one week, but then, less than a month later, nearly none... and the exact reason this happened is still a mystery.
