The World Health Organisation has recently released a plan designed to meet ‘the greatest threat to global public health.’ The report describes the threat as neither predictable nor preventable, and not a question of if it will strike the world, but when. The Global Influenza Strategy 2019-2030 aims to enable the world to better coordinate and respond to the threat posed by a potential influenza pandemic. In our increasingly globalised and interconnected world the threats posed by such pandemics are taken extremely seriously. This is due, in part, to the experiences of a previous pandemic, when global movements saw a virus emerge that would devastate a worldwide population already scarred by the carnage of war.

Although a number of pandemics have occurred in previous decades, the most deadly was the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919. The Spanish Flu has been described by the author Laura Spinney as ‘the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.’ This pandemic is estimated to have caused the deaths of between 50-100 million people and infected one-third of the human population, around 500 million people. The flu killed far more than either the First or Second World Wars, and may even have killed more than the death tolls from both conflicts combined. The flu forced fundamental changes to public heath care systems across the globe and its severity and impact is still felt today.