In a series of black-and-white photographs, Chris Wild of Mashable, a popular tech website, remembers the Spanish flu, the deadliest epidemic in world history.
The article was published under Retronaut, a Mashable section dedicated to old stories told in photographs. Entitled "The Forgotten Epidemic," the photos, whose dates range from 1918 to 1920, the duration of the deadly flu, included a Red Cross employee, an American policeman, and several other people trying to get on with their normal lives while covered with a face mask as a way of reducing the spread of the virus. There's also an image dated February 27, 1919, of a woman who was wearing a "flu nozzle."
While the world wasn't immune to flu prior to the epidemic, the Spanish flu was a completely different breed. Within 2 years, it wiped out between 3% and 5% of the world's population, killing no less than 500 million people-more than the number of individuals, soldiers and health workers included, who died during World War I.
No one still knows the real cause or origin of the Flu, although many theories are available. One idea is that it may have begun in a military camp in Kansas. John Oxford, a virologist, believed that it originated in a hospital and military camp somewhere in France. Aside from the country being badly hit by the epidemic, the camp was also coincidentally located near animals such as pigs. He believed that the virus may have come from the birds and mutated once it was acquired by the pigs. The humans were then infected by the pigs kept close to the front.
Contrary to other flu strains, the Spanish flu, which came in two waves, affected healthy individuals between 20 and 40 years old as their immune system had a more severe reaction to it.
Although it affected North America, East Asia, and most of Europe, Spain did not censor news about deaths and virus spread. Thus, most people came to know it as the Spanish flu.
