The Spanish flu of 1918 may have killed more people than the first world war.
The big shift occurred after the carnage of the first world war and the Spanish flu that followed.
As a comparison, the Spanish flu of 1918, in which 40 million people died, had only about 2-3 % kill-rate.
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For example, it did not flinch when, in 2005, researchers at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Maryland reconstructed the Spanish flu virus.
Fellowes has the advantage of working in the past, where even the greatest calamities, like the Great War and the Spanish flu, have played out to their conclusions, which he can borrow from at his convenience.
"I ... would like to remind people that in 1918 the Spanish flu showed a surge in the spring, and then disappeared in the summer months, only to return in the autumn of 1918 with a vengeance, " Hartl said.
Nevertheless, the last four pandemics - the Spanish Flu that began in 1918, the Asian Flu of 1957, the Hong Kong Flu of 1958 and the swine flu of 2009 - were all preceded by periods of La Nina conditions.
Medical historians believe that a large proportion of those who died of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 were not killed by the flu virus, but by secondary bacterial pneumonia, which was difficult to treat before the introduction of antibiotics.
One prominent critic, Peter Palese, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, recalls his own work in 2005 on the reconstruction of the Spanish-flu virus.
"I think the world is infinitely better prepared than it was 90 years ago, " said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl, referring to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed as many as 20 million people.
In this respect if we compare the 1918 Spanish flu, a swine flu variant (largest human killer of all time that took up to 100 million lives) and the 2009 Swine Flu, we see that a drugs cure would come far too late and most of us (between 300milion and over 1 billion worldwide is estimated) would be dead.
Theatres have closed down for ten days, the first time they have all gone dark since 1918 when Spanish flu swept the world.
It was actually the re-emergence of Spanish flu or H1N1, which people thought had gone extinct.
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