where does the name spanish flu come from
1918 flu pandemic To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.[17][18] However, papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII).[19] This reporting dichotomy created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit,[20] thereby giving rise to the pandemic's nickname, Spanish Flu.[21] In Spain, a different nickname was adopted, the Naples Soldier (Soldado de Nápoles), which came from a musical operetta (zarzuela) titled La canción del olvido (The Song of Forgetting), which premiered in Madrid during the first epidemic wave. Federico Romero, one of the librettists, quipped that the play's most popular musical number, Naples Soldier, was as catchy as the flu.[22]
1918 flu pandemic The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus.[1] It infected 500 million people around the world,[2] including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million (three to five percent of the world's population[3]), making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.[4][5][6] Disease had already greatly limited life expectancy in the early 20th century. A considerable spike occurred at the time of the pandemic, specifically the year 1918. Life expectancy in the United States alone dropped by about 12 years.[7][8][9][10]