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Why was the 1918 flu so deadly?
While future research will teach us more about the characteristics of the 1918 flu that made it so devastating, several factors may have played key roles.
Military personnel often shared cramped quarters in barracks, boats, trains, and trenches, making it easy for a single infected person to transmit the virus to dozens of nearby comrades. The war required soldiers and other personnel to be transported all over the world, both for training and combat, and with them went the flu virus.
One of the most startling characteristics of the 1918 fly is the number of young people between the ages of 20 and 40 who died during the pandemic. These are normally considered the healthier individuals of a society and not generally considered an at-risk group during outbreaks of flu.
This had led some researchers to hypothesize that a flu virus with key similarities to the 1918 strain circulated in the early to mid-1800s and disappeared prior to 1889. As a result, individuals who were elderly in 1918 may have acquired some immunity to the flu virus, while those in a younger generations who were not previously exposed had no acquired immunity. |