A hundred years ago, from early 1918 to early 1920, the world was in the grip of a pandemic that came to be known as ‘The Spanish Flu’. It is estimated that one in three people alive were infected (500 million) and that between 50-100 million died.
The pandemic claimed the lives of nearly 250,000 Britons and, cruelly for a nation that had seen so many young men killed in the First World War, the majority of those who died were adults aged 20 to 40. The mortality was the inverse of most flu seasons, when deaths fall most heavily on the elderly and the under-fives.
But recent research suggests that the pandemic seems to have passed Buriton by.
Details from the research, contributed by Clive Harfield, are attached here: Buriton and the Spanish flu
