History of Influenza
Hippocrates recorded an epidemic of a flu-like infection in 412 B.C that wiped out the Athenian army.
The sixteenth century saw two flu pandemics that spread throughout Europe. The first, in 1510, infected nearly the entire population of Europe, but claimed few lives.
The second, in 1580, devastated cities and spread through the whole of Western Europe. The city of Rome, for example, had 9,000 fatalities.
At least pandemics of flu spread throughout Europe in the seventeenth century. In the past of 200 years eight great flu pandemics seized the world prior to the devastation wrought by the 1918 flu.
During a period of fourteen months beginning in the spring of 1918, half of the entire world’s population was infected with the influenza virus and nearly 41 million people died.
Every country in the world was affected, no matter how remote, and this occurred in an era before air travel and a global community existed.
Victims who died during the 1918 flu were typically healthy young adults. Among the 20 to 40 year old age group, the fatality rate from the 1918 flu was 50 percent.
The virus of 1918 was so effective at killing its host that within a short period of time it rendered itself extinct, people either immune to the virus or dead.
Since that time several other lesser pandemics have occurred across the globe, but health officials anxiously await the next deadly flu pandemic, which they predict as inevitable.
When it occurs, experts foresee millions of death, hospitals quickly flooded with cases of pneumonia, and every health care system in the world over whelmed by the volume of flu victims.
History of Influenza
