Because Spanish press spread awareness about the virus ripping through its population while other countries remained mum the flu got named after Spain. The latter fact ie it came from Spain led to the flu receiving its place in history as The Spanish Flu Even the king of Spain and President Woodrow Wilson it is believed contracted the.
Why Was It Called The Spanish Flu History
The most common name for the killer virus the Spanish flu implied of course that it originated in Spain.
Why is the spanish flu called the spanish flu. The places that escaped the Spanish flu. Perhaps this was because there were serious outbreaks in both Madrid and Seville that infected eight million people in May of 1918 alone even almost taking out the king himself Alfonso XIII. Because Spanish news sources were the only ones reporting on the flu many believed it originated there the Spanish meanwhile believed the virus came from France and called it the French Flu.
The flu that transformed the 20th Century. Spanish flu is a misnomer and the strain is theorized to have actually developed in Kansas a 2018 Associated Press story read. Naming a disease after a place can also be problematicsometimes because of racism but sometimes because it obscures where the disease really came from.
Exactly where the disease originated is unknown but the. It became known as Spanish flu only because the Spanish news media was the first to widely report the epidemic which had been hushed by wartime censors elsewhere in Europe. The aftermath of the First World War is a time of huge censorship.
Its a myth that flu vaccines give you the flu. The 1918 flu pandemic became known as the Spanish flu because wartime censors minimized reports of the illness while the Spanish press did not. Spain however is neutral.
By the time the Spanish flu broke out in the spring of 1918 the United States France and Germany among other countries were embroiled in World War I. In 1918 an influenza pandemic swept the world causing more deaths in a year than any event in human historya rather broadly estimated 50 million to 100 million or 3. The big exception was Spain which being neutral had a much freer press.
WWI undoubtedly added to the horrors of Spanish flu Catharine Arnold author of the book Pandemic 1918 wrote in an email to Science Friday. This neglect of the Spanish influenza so-called because Spain was one of the few countries in 1918 to report the spreading illness extended to the public sphere hence the marked absence of. Global mobilization of millions of troops meant that the flu spread swiftly carried from the New World to the old on troopships and fanning out from ports as far apart as India.
Spain was not hit especially badly compared to other countries but wartime censorship exaggerated the affects of the virus there. The flu pandemic of 1918-19 gets named the Spanish flu but not because of where it originated. When the flu hit Spain especially when King Alphonse XIII fell seriously ill the papers were full of it.
Americas troop mobilization in World War I spread. But yet the pandemic was called Spanish Flu again a result of the war. On March 20 the Facebook page.
As the flu virus made its way across Europe in late 1918 nations on both sides of the conflict were tight-lipped about how this deadly disease was taking the lives of combatants fearing how it might affect morale. It is thought the first cases were in military forts in the United States before spreading at an alarming rate to Europe. The disease was named Spanish Flu because of where cases first began to develop.
London newspapers jumped on the story calling the illness the Spanish influenza or the Spanish grip because the symptoms resembled the French grippe. Why was the virus called the Spanish flu.