HEALTH

The 1918 Influenza

1918 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In the last year of the First World War, an influenza virus of avian origin circled the globe twice, sparing no country, and killed with an inverted signature: fastest among adults in their twenties and thirties. Estimates of the dead range from 17 to 100 million. The killer itself was recovered eight decades later, its genome read from victims' preserved lungs, and the resurrected virus proved tens of thousands of times more virulent in primates than seasonal flu.

Why it matters

Every influenza pandemic since is a descendant: the 1918 H1N1 founded the lineages that still circulate and kill each winter, an ongoing pandemic era. The event fixed the nightmare scenario against which pandemic preparedness is measured, and its unsolved riddles, the young adult mortality, the true toll, keep it a live research subject. It is the modern proof that a respiratory virus can outkill a world war.

Dating & uncertainty

The pandemic's waves ran from early 1918 to 1919. Its toll is the disputed part: 50 to 100 million deaths in the most cited estimates, revised down to about 17 million by a 2018 reanalysis of mortality registers, a threefold disagreement about the deadliest weeks in modern history. Where the virus first entered humans, America and Europe both argued, is also unsettled.

Sources

1. Taubenberger et al. (2019), Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine · The 1918 influenza pandemic and its legacydoi:10.1101/cshperspect.a038695
2. Spreeuwenberg et al. (2018), American Journal of Epidemiology · Reassessing the global mortality burden of the 1918 influenza pandemicdoi:10.1093/aje/kwy191
3. Berche (2022), Presse Médicale · The Spanish fludoi:10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104127

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:3029.6 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day