Devil's Flu - 9780805066227

In 1918, the Spanish flu killed up to 40 million people across the planet. From the remotest villages in Arctic climates to crowded U.S. cities to the battlefields of Europe, there were plague houses in which whole families lay sick or dead. In Madras, train services stopped running as one-third of its workforce fell ill. In Calcutta, the postal service and the legal system ground to a halt. And in the United States, it killed more Americans than all the wars fought in the twentieth century put together. The disease did not discriminate. It took whom it pleased - rich or poor, distinguished or humble, hungry or well nourished, healthy or infirm. It was a flu unlike any that the world had encountered before or that has come along since.
The Devil's Flu recounts the story of this terrible forgotten tragedy and the global scientific community's effort to avert another such disaster. It remains a mystery why the 1918 outbreak was so devastating. In August 1998, scientists exhumed the bodies of seven miners buried for eighty years within the Norwegian Arctic Circle, in order to search for clues. There's a chance that their frozen graves will have preserved fragments of the 1918 virus that killed them, and that these remnants will tell us why the Spanish strain proved to be so catastrophic. As far as the next pandemic is concerned, scientists agree: It's not a question of if, but when.