Spanish Flu is a bit of misnomer. It’s also known as the Great Influenza Pandemic, the 1918 Flu Epidemic, and La Grippe. There’s nothing to suggest it originated in Spain at all.

The name Spanish Flu seems to have arisen because the early stages of the illness received a lot more attention and media coverage in Spain than in the rest of the world because Spain had been neutral during the war, there were no other distracting major new stories, and no wartime censorship. The Spanish called it the French Flu.

The first outbreaks of Spanish Flu noted as being definitely this illness were in America, rather than anywhere else. In early March 1918, cases were observed in Fort Riley, a military base in Kansas, and Queens, a borough in New York.

The strain at that time seems not to have been quite as dangerous as one which later emerged. In August 1918, a more infectious and dangerous strain appears to have appeared simultaneously in France, Sierra Leone, and Boston, America.

Neither the exact world population at the time nor the exact number of people who died from the Spanish Flu is known. An estimated 2.5 to 5% of the world’s population may well have died of the illness, and over 20% of the world’s human beings caught the illness.

The Spanish Flu appears to have killed about 25 million people in the first six months after breaking into the human population, an interesting comparison with Aids, which killed 25 million people in its first 25 years after identification.

It struck some places much more viciously than others. The countries thought to have had the highest infection and death rates are in the Pacific, with Western Samoa having 90% of the population catching the virus, 25% of adults and 10% of children dying from the illness. The island territory of Nauru also suffered a death toll of 16% of the population.

Japan had a particularly low death rate, at about 0.5% of the population.

American Samoa and New Caledonia, in the Pacific, prevented any deaths whatsoever from Influenza by imposing quarantines and block aids which prevented infected people from arriving on the islands.

Far more people died from the Spanish Flu than died in all the theatres of war in the First World War put together.

For example, an estimated 650 to 700,000 American citizens died of the Spanish Flu, which is ten times as many as died in the First World War.

Half the American soldiers who died in the European war theatres died of the Flu rather than of fighting.