Going Viral: The Geopolitics of the Flu

In the span of about a year from 1918 to 1919, the Spanish influenza killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million people around the world. Many of the outside factors that contributed to the severity of the outbreak were unique to their time. The wartime world was more connected, allowing the virus to spread faster than ever, but the still-nascent understanding of how diseases worked meant that sanitation guidelines and treatment methods were lagging. Meanwhile, World War I had ravaged economies and populations across the globe and contributed to media censoring that prevented information about the virus to be shared. Since then, vaccines and medicines have been developed to fight all sorts of diseases. Moreover, humans now have the capability to more closely track the spread of disease, through social media and the 24-hour news cycle. And yet, the influenza virus, with its own ability to rapidly mutate and...