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The Great Influenza

the Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Jun 21, 2017
Point Of Fact: The reason it is called the Spanish Influenza is because Spain, being neutral during World War I, did not censor its papers and news media, which is why the world first learn of this pandemic through the deaths in Spain. It is surmised this nightmare was created when the flu strain that had developed in the New World combined with the flu strain of the Old World, creating a super strain that killed people faster than they could be buried or, in some cases, even have time to realize how sick they were (one woman, as a child of eight, remembers walking down the streets of London while people dropped dead around her mother and her.) Bureaucratic obstinacy created this pandemic as many `top brass` refused to admit there was such a crisis (bad for patriotic morale) and (in the case of the United States) kept stuffing sick soldiers into troop ships and sending them `off to do battle`...until the flood of telegrams reached them reporting arriving ships loaded with nothing but corpses! For an excellent documentary on this unjustly forgotten nightmare, see 'INFLUENZA 1918', a PBS special in the St. Louis City Library`s Film Library - both in DVD and VHS.