Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week as the world struggles to contain the coronavirus pandemic, we're looking back at the lessons that can be learned from previous

outbreaks of deadly viral infections, including the biggest killer of them all, the 1918 Spanish

flu.

Two hours after admission, they have the mahogany spots over the cheekbones, and a few hours

later you can begin to see the cyanosis spreading all over the face, and it is simply a struggle

for air until they suffocate.

The SARS outbreak in the early 2000s.

All these patients were coming into the intensive care unit.

Nobody was getting better and I remember after about five or six days worrying that we were almost full.

Also Marburg fever in 1960s Germany, the discovery of Ebola in the 1970s.

By the time we got to the village,

the hospital had been closed because most of the nursing staff

had either died from close contact

and infection by people who were sick or fled from the village.

And polio.

Every parent in the United States, everywhere knew the symptoms of polio, unable to move an arm or a leg or the difficulty in breathing.

All those diseases being looked at later in the podcast, but we begin with that deadliest

outbreak of them all.

In 1918, more than 50 million people

perished in an outbreak of flu which spread all over the world

in the wake of the First World War.

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