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The flu spread to almost every country in the world - and you have to realise that, back in 1918, travel was not as convenient and widespread as it is today, so the chances of a flu virus spreading today is very much higher.
To this day, no one knows exactly how many people died from the 1918 Spanish flu. The most commonly cited figure is between 25 million and 50 million. Some scientists believe, however, it could have been as high as 100 million.
Parallels between the Spanish and swine flu
The bad news about the 2009 swine flu, or Type A H1N1, is that is belongs to the same classification as the virus associated with the 1918 Spanish flu. Both are Type A H1N1 - althugh the swine flu virus is a completely new strain that had never been previously detected. So it is not exactly the same as the virus that caused the worldwide flu epidemic in 1918.
Yet another bad news is that people today are a lot less healthy than those of a hundred years ago. There is no way to prove this statement. If anything, the one measure of health - average lifespans - seem to indicate that people have become "healthier". But that is misleading. Food quality has deteriorated, lifestyles have become more stressful... people today are a lot less healthy than those who experienced the Spanish flu in 1918.
But not all is gloomy. One good news is that, so far, the swine flu has proven to be relatively mild. Although several people have died, most others affected by the current swine flu or A H1N1 experienced only mild flu symptoms.
However, flu viruses keep changing, or mutating. And what we still don't know is whether the current strain of swine flu or Type A H1N1 will later mutate into something more harmful. That was what happened with the 1918 Spanish flu. The initial strain was relatively mild, but later it became deadly.
Moreover, if you examine flu deaths associated with the 1918 flu outbreak, you will realise that a lot of the victims actually died from pneumonia - a lung infection that is often a complication of the flu and other illnesses. Very few actually died from the flu itself. This is another piece of good news because medical science today is much better equipped to deal with pneumonia than it was a hundred years ago.
Avian flu
So the present swine flu outbreak may or may not turn out to be as severe as the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.
Meanwhile, it is also worth nothing that many of the dire predictions made when a new form of avian flu first appeared about six years ago in 2004 did not materialise. Various scientists - as well as politicians like former US President George Bush - repeatedly predicted that millions of people will die from the avian flu.
Well, people did die. But as of Janaury 2009, the number of avian flu casualties was only 248, not the millions that was predicted.
We have to ask ourselves - to what extent are the drug companies drumming up public fear in order to increase their sales of flu vaccines and antiviral drugs?
Lessons from the 1918 Spanish flu
One of the most interesting and most important lessons from the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic has sadly still not been learned. This is the fact that during the 1918 flu epidemic, various forms of alternative healthcare achieved much higher success rates than medical science.
During that epidemic, patients treated by convention allopathic or chemical-based medicine had a mortality rate of between 30 percent and 40 percent. In the case of one hospital in New York, the mortality rate was as high as 68 percent.
In sharp contrast, patients treated with osteopathy and chiropractic experienced a mortality rate of less than 0.25 percent! This is all the more surprising considering the fact that both osteopathy and chiropractic are forms of manipulation therapy, more commonly applied to treat body aches and pains, rather than infectious diseases.
Homeopathic medicine for Spanish flu victims was also highly successful, with only about 1 percent mortality.
Despite the glaring contrast in success rates chemical-based medicine and more natural forms of healthcaree, chemical-based medicine has been so so effective in its public relations campaign that it remains the medicine of choice for almost everybody.
Do we need another failure of chemical-based medicine in the current swine flu outbreak before more people wake up to its ineffectiveness and its dangers?
Was the Spanish flu really the flu?
Meanwhile, questions are being asked as to whether the 1918 flu epidemic was, in fact, a form of flu? The flu virus was first identified only during in 1933. So no one can say for sure if the 1918 edipemic was really a flu epidemic. There are reasons, instead, to believe that it could have been a reaction to vaccination.
In 1911, vaccinations were made compulsory for US Army troops and the death rate from typhoid vaccination rose to the highest point in the history of the US Army. Henry L Stimson, the US US Secretary of War, reported that seven men dropped dead after being vaccinated. He also reported 63 deaths and 28,585 cases of hepatitis as a direct result of yellow fever vaccination during only six months of WW1.
Unfortunately, these deaths did not result in vaccinations being stopped. Instead, more powerful vaccines were given to US troops. And so, in 1917, 19,608 men suffering from anti-typhoid vaccinations were admitted into army hospitals. The Irish Examiner reported at that time:
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When army doctors tried to suppress the symptoms of typhoid with a stronger vaccine, it caused a worse form of typhoid paratyphoid. But when they concocted an even stronger vaccine to suppress that one, they created an even worse disease - Spanish flu.
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Click here to read more about flu vaccine side effects and pneumonia vaccine side effects.