Spanish Flu

Type: Concept

As of November 2026, Spanish Flu has been mentioned in 2 episodes across 2 podcasts, first heard Nov 2025 on Radiolab. In the Morbid podcast episode, Ash discusses the Spanish flu as a significant global crisis that overshadowed the encephalitis lethargica epidemic. The episode highlights how the Spanish flu, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, spread following World War I, influencing the public health landscape of that time. This context helps listeners understand the interconnectedness of these pandemics.

The 1918–1920 flu pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or by the misleading name Spanish flu, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 subtype of the influenza A virus. The earliest probable cases were documented in March 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas, United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been