This coming Sunday we will mark 100 years since the armistice that ended World War I. The war shaped global trends for much of the ensuing century; not least of its legacies was the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919. Neither humanity’s first nor last widespread encounter with influenza, the 1918-19 pandemic is notable for how quickly and widely it spread: in less than 6 months it was on every continent and ultimately infected as many as 1 out of every 3 people on the planet. Unprecedented troop mobilization meant that young people were gathered together from the corners of many nations, mixed together in groupings that otherwise would have remained hundreds or thousands of miles apart their entire lives, and then sent to distant fronts with crowded living conditions. The war was not solely responsible for the pandemic, and peculiarities of the virus made it especially deadly, but one could scarcely engineer a better scenario for spreading a pathogen.
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