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The Influenza pandemic of 1918 was a heavy pandemic of influenza. It lasted from January 1918 to December 1920. About 500 million people were infected across the world. The pandemic spread to remote Pacific Islands and the Arctic. It killed 50 million to 100 million people—3 to 5 percent of the world's population at the time. This means it was one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.
To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States; but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII). This situation created the false impression of Spain being especially hard-hit. It also resulted in the nickname Spanish flu.
In most cases, influenza outbreaks kill young people, or the elderly, or those patients that are already weakened. This was not the case for the 1918 pandemic, which killed predominantly healthy young adults. Modern research, using virus taken from the bodies of frozen victims, has concluded that the virus kills through a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system). The strong immune reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths among those groups.
Historical and epidemiological data are insufficient to identify the pandemic's geographic origin. The pandemic was implicated in the outbreak of encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s.
Number of deaths in New York City, Berlin, Paris, and London (Museum of Health & Medicine, Washington), c. 1918–1919
Two American Red Cross nurses demonstrated treatment practices during the influenza pandemic of 1918.
Albertan farmers wore masks to protect themselves from the flu.
Policemen wearing masks provided by the American Red Cross in Seattle, 1918
A street car conductor in Seattle in 1918 refusing to allow passengers aboard who are not wearing masks
Red Cross workers remove a flu victim in St. Louis, Missouri (1918)
Influenza ward at Walter Reed Hospital during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1919
Burying flu victims, North River, Canada (1918)
1919 Tokyo, Japan
Japanese poster in 1919
Demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington, D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918
Cavalry memorial on the hill Lueg, memory of the Bernese cavalrymen victims of the 1918 flu pandemic; Emmental, Bern, Switzerland
Soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, ill with Spanish influenza at a hospital ward at Camp Funston.
American Red Cross nurses tend to flu patients in temporary wards set up inside Oakland Municipal Auditorium, 1918.
An electron micrograph showing recreated 1918 influenza virions.
Spanish biologists and the flu microbe (Spain, 1918)
