Remember the Spanish Flu of 1918? Of course you don?t. That?s the freakishly deadly influenza strain that swept the globe in 1918 and 1919, wiping out 30 million to 50 million people. It infected about one in four Americans and killed about 675,000. It didn?t just kill little kids and the elderly, either, like most flu strains. This one was unusually devastating in young, healthy people?although why the “mother of all pandemics” behaved as it did is not fully understood.
Office of Strategic Communication