Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

by Dr Jeremy Brown

We all harbor the desire to see cancer cured and heart disease eliminated. I obviously share these hopes, but as an ER doctor I have found myself wishing for something far more modest: a cure for influenza. We tend to shrug off the flu as just a nasty cold, but in the United States alone it kills between 36,000 and 50,000 people each year. That’s an astonishing and depressing number. But here is even worse news: if a pandemic strain of influenza as deadly as the 1918 virus were to infect the United States today, more than 2 million people could die. No conceivable natural disaster would compare. And it’s not something we can just pretend won’t affect us. In early 2018 newspapers warned that the flu season was “the worst in nearly a decade.” All across the country there were reports of young, healthy people dying. Several hospitals were so overwhelmed with the influx of flu patients that they had to set up triage tents or turn patients away. Flu is certainly not “the emperor of all maladies,” as cancer was described by the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, but it is the malady of all empires. It has been with us since the dawn of time, and it has afflicted each civilization and society in every corner of the globe.