Pandemics don’t come around often, but when they do …

In 2018 we commemorated the centenary of the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918, often known as Spanish Flu.

Despite only lasting a few months, the loss of life globally is estimated to be somewhere between 50-100 million. 

An article from The Atlantic has this to say:

That year, as pandemic influenza ravaged communities as diverse as California and Kolkata, no one knew what was killing them. Theories abounded. Some suggested it was a misalignment of the planets. (That’s what gave us the name influenza, from the Italian word for “influence.”) Others believed the cause was tainted Russian oats, or volcanic eruptions. Microbiologists focused on a bacterium they had discovered decades earlier in the lungs of influenza victims, and called it Bacillus influenza. But they had merely recognized a bacterium that invades lungs already weakened from influenza. Not until…