In the dying months of World War I, Spanish flu suddenly overwhelmed the world, killing between 50 and 100 million people. Nowhere escaped this common enemy: in Britain, 250,000 people died, in the United States it was 750,000, while European deaths reached over two million. The numbers are staggering. And yet at the time, news of the danger was suppressed for fear of impacting war-time morale. Behind the numbers are human lives, stories of those who suffered and fought it – in the hospitals and laboratories. Published 100 years after the most devastating pandemic in world history, Pandemic 1918 uses previously unpublished records, memoirs, diaries and government publications to uncover the human story of 1918.
