The influenza pandemic of 1918 was irregular, and that it was particularly widespread and particularly deadly.

Often called the Spanish flu, the disease probably didn't actually start in Spain.

We don't know where it started, but we do know that it gained that moniker, not because

of its origin, but because reports of the disease's prevalence in Spain seemed amplified compared

to reports from other countries, because censorship and other typically journalistically rich

economies, like Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, was particularly

harsh at this point in history. That censorship was the result of wartime censorship boards.

World War I was brought to an effective end when Germany signed an armistice in November of 1918,

and it was brought to an official end by the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June of 1919.

But one of the defining features of the First World War was that of front lines reporting,

enabled in part by the emergence of the electric telegraph and of sophisticated and fairly

reliable railway systems.

So journalists could report from the front lines of the conflict, take pre-Codachrome color photographs, and wire

their reports very quickly back home. Governments implemented often heavy-handed censorship

programs, though, to make sure they were able to filter what made it into their newspapers

and radio news programs, both to keep leaks of vital military information from reaching the enemy,

reports about soldiers on the ground, for instance, that could provide their opposition

with identifying geographic information, which, in turn, could provide them with targets,

and to keep morale high at home, so that their non-combat population would stay optimistic, thus keeping the industrial,

economic, and population-generating and sustaining aspect of the war machine, steadily churning along.

What all of this meant for the emergence of this highly virulent flu was that, despite the high

number of people who caught it and the high number of deaths that

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