Every year more and more frightening news about new types of influenza appears. People buy huge quantities of a wide variety of medicines, vaccinate and scold doctors who can’t come up with reliable means of protection against this disease. But in fact, the largest pandemic of this terrible disease was registered back in 1918. Then the so-called "Spanish Flu" - the flu, first registered in Spain, claimed millions of lives around the world. The exact place of occurrence of this virus has not been reliably established, so many experts believe that almost any country in the world could be the source of the "Spanish" flu.
The number of victims of this disease cannot be accurately determined, since at that time the First World War was still going on and other diseases and famine also raged in the vastness of Europe. According to some sources, in 25 weeks the flu"Spaniard" took the lives of about 25 million people. The greatest spread of this disease was facilitated by the active movement of troops of various states, spreading the epidemic over vast territories. Compared to the number of victims of the avian or swine virus, the Spanish flu is the record-breaking flu that has claimed the lives of tens of millions of people in just a few months. Of course, many factors contributed to this: hunger, unsanitary conditions, poor medical care, lack of antiviral drugs. That is why the "Spanish flu" - the flu, which kept many people terrified for more than two years. At the same time, not only the poorest sections of society, but also quite successful and rich people were exposed to the danger of infection. "Spanish flu" - the flu, which equalized everyone in terms of the risk of disease.
Until now, it has not been established exactly how many human lives this virus actually took. Some historians believe that more than 1% of the population of the entire Earth (about 100 million people) died from it. Such a number of victims is comparable only with the terrible epidemics of plague and smallpox. According to the available versions of the origin of this virus, the “Spanish flu” is a flu that came to Europe from the United States, although some scientists claim that it came from Asia, or rather, from China. The first outbreak of this disease was noted in 1918. At that time, the influenza pandemic captured 20 countries of the world, gradually spreading to North Africa and India. At the end of this year, it swept the entire planet, except for Australia and Madagascar. The third wave of the epidemic has captured almost all countries of the world. The pandemic lasted until the end of 1920
"Spanish flu" - influenza with an unusual pattern of disease development. It quickly turned into a complicated form, affecting the cardiovascular system and causing severe pneumonia, accompanied by severe and painful hemoptysis. Since there were no antiviral drugs in those days, a cure for this disease was almost impossible. Only people with strong immune systems had a chance to survive this pandemic. Only the natural attenuation of the epidemic stopped the mass death of people. Learned from bitter experience, people are constantly trying to create more and more vaccines for the influenza virus. This work can never be finished as this pathogen is constantly mutating and changing. Influenza vaccination may reduce the risk of contracting some types of viruses (for which this vaccine is created), but does not guarantee the inability to catch some other types of them.
