2. Spanish flu
Death toll: 75 million (estimated 50 -100 million)
Year: 1918 – 1919
In 1918, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief as the Great War, the biggest and bloodiest conflict in human history, ended. People everywhere started painstakingly putting their lives together after more than four years of misery, destruction, and death. Nobody suspected that even greater disaster was already set in motion. In March of 1918, a mess cook named Private Albert Gitchell died of influenza at Camp Funston in Kansas, one of many training camps set up by the United States Army preparing troops for overseas deployment to France. The origin of the virus is still contested, but Camp Funston was the site of the first recorded outbreak of 1918 flu epidemics that ravaged the world. According to the recent studies, between 50 and 100 million people died in 1918 and 1919. The disease was nicknamed the Spanish Flu because only Spain, among all other affected countries, didn’t downplay the number of casualties in daily newspaper reports and at the time, it seemed that the center of pandemics was there.
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