The flu pandemic of 1918
Earlier this week, BBC4 screened a very well-made and rather timely drama documentary on the efforts of Dr James Niven to combat the impact of the second wave of Spanish flu in Manchester in 1918. The programme was called “The Forgotten Fallen” and will be repeated.
As a result of Niven’s efforts, only 2,000 of the Manchester’s one million population died. In London, 10,000 lost their lives at a rate of 1,500 a week at its peak. But there was an unexpected third wave. The final death toll for the UK was 228,000.
It is estimated that anywhere from 50 to 100 million people were killed worldwide with the figure of 70 million often quoted. An estimated 500 million people, one third of the world’s population (approximately 1.6 billion at the time), became infected.
A recent study in the “New England Journal of Medicine” reports that the current swine flu virus is a fourth generation descendant of the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak and contains the same H1N1 virus. “All human-adapted Influenza A viruses are descendants, direct or indirect, of that founding virus” says Jeffrey Taubenberger, a co-author of the report.
For more information on Spanish flu, see here.