Netflix's 'Pandemic': Spanish flu that killed 100M shows us that the next outbreak could be just around the corner
In a remote region of Butler County, Pennsylvania, there lies a stretch of land that remains forgotten to the masses but shouldn't be so. Here lies the mass grave of 20-odd people. They did not die due to some gruesome crime. It belongs to those who, more than a century ago, succumbed to the Spanish flu in what was one of the worst pandemics mankind has ever seen.
Netflix's latest docuseries 'Pandemic: How To Prevent An Outbreak,' follows the lives of those who are on the frontline of the battle to prevent the breakout of the next big pandemic, which at Earth's current population, could prove a threat to our very existence.
The consensus at the moment is that such an event is not a matter of if but a matter of when. Yet, it seems that humanity has forgotten the chastizing lesson from 1918: it doesn't take a World War to threaten the extinction of our species.
After all, the pandemic broke out after World War 1, when soldiers were returning home in a celebratory mood. Little did they know that hundreds of thousands of them were carrying what would prove to be a deadly strain of the H1N1 influenza virus, which came to be commonly known as the Spanish flu.
The virus had soon infected more than 500 million around the world -- which, at the time, was over 25 percent of the entire population of 1.8 billion -- including people on remote Pacific islands and, even in the Arctic.
The infection had caught the world, which was still reeling from the effects of the war, by surprise and in its first 25 weeks, killed 25 million people.
By its end, in 1920, the Spanish flu had killed anywhere between 50 and 100 million people, making its death toll more than that of World War I and World War II combined; that too, by some margin. The pandemic was so bad in the U.S., that it dropped the life expectancy in the country by 12 years in its first year.
The devastation of the Spanish flu was compounded by the fact that it killed a disproportionately large proportion of young adults, mostly due to a combination of malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals and poor hygiene.
While the exact number of lives it claimed remains a subject of debate, the Spanish flu has been described as the 'greatest medical holocaust in history', a title that makes sense when you consider it killed more in a year than the Black Death did in a century.
And while that dark stain on our history is firmly in the rearview mirror, experts have repeatedly warned over the past few years that the next major pandemic is on the horizon. That the warning signs are obvious to those not turning a blind eye.
They're not wrong. Besides the fear of the Ebola virus outbreak that gripped the world a few years ago (which eventually proved to be sensationalized), we just need to turn our clocks back to the late 2000s to see how quickly things can go awry.
The 2009 flu pandemic, which lasted for close to two years, also involved the H1N1 virus, albeit in a new version. Dubbed the 'Swine flu', it went on to infect an estimated 11 to 21 percent of the global population -- around 1.3 billion people -- bolstered by humanity's leaps in travel technology that meant the virus could now find itself across continents with ease.
Like its 20th-century counterpart, Swine flu infected young adults and claimed anywhere between 151,000 and 579,000 lives depending on what figures you choose to believe.
These pandemics, whether we like it or not, are cyclic and seemingly strike at a time when we have collectively let our guards down. 2019, experts say, was one of the worst flu seasons in recent memory, exacerbated by a burgeoning anti-vax movement that defies all logic.
It is not all doom and gloom, however. There is some hope in the form of a universal vaccine that is currently in development which will provide immunity against not only current strains of influenza, but also future ones.
Still at its embryonic stage, the vaccine currently involves seven shots and is being tested on pigs in Guatemala because of federal restrictions in the United States. The objective, researchers say, is to condense it all into one shot and have it in human trials by 2025 so the next pandemic is intercepted before it can take root.
'Pandemic: How To Prevent An Outbreak' is now streaming on Netflix.