Looks like a perfectly timed publication but look again: the book was published in 2017.
That means Laura Spinney wrote it as a interesting scientific research about Spanish flu and added several possibilities how the future epidemics might develop - all of this, before Covid swept across the planet and forced us to adapt to different times. Naturally, many of us looked up to all the informations about Spanish Flu, to figure out how the epidemics work, how long do they last, what makes them disappear, etc - I have still not figured out exactly how it just vanished but this book makes it somehow clearer that the virus eventually weakened. (It is still alive and kept in a high-security containment facility in Atlanta, Georgia.)
In her wildest dreams Spinney could not imagine that the whole world would look up to her book very soon after its publishing - she does approach Spanish flu epidemics from many different angles and points at so many similarities to our current situation that (curiously) it felt comforting to know that the world has already went trough this situation and survived. Personally I found fascinating how all of this comes out as a sort of déjà vu - a hundred years ago we have been there and behaved more or the less exactly the same. First of all, there was a finger pointing - "In Senegal it was the Brazilian flu and in Brazil the German flu, while the Danes thought it ‘came from the south’. The Poles called it the Bolshevik disease, the Persians blamed the British, and the Japanese blamed their wrestlers: after it first broke out at a sumo tournament, they dubbed it ‘sumo flu’." Than there was a matter of competing interests of collective - historian Alfred Crosby, who told the story of the flu in America, argued that democracy was unhelpful in a pandemic. The demands of national security, a thriving economy and public health are rarely aligned, and elected representatives defending the first two undermine the third, simply by doing their job. The most heated discussions of all, however, revolved around vaccination - in those long gone days before the internet, gossip got mixed up with ignorance, prejudice, religion and guesswork, just as today. I don't really get it why Spinney is so determined to find the start of the epidemic because it doesn't really matter - I might be wrong but once it spread, the virus was unleashed and that is all that matter - was it Asia, Canada or battlefields of WW1 in Europe, what difference does it make?
Most scientists now agree that the event that triggered it–the spillover of the pandemic strain from birds to humans–would have happened whether or not the world had been at war, but that the war contributed to its exceptional virulence, while at the same time helping to spread the virus around the world. Interesting message from the book is that viruses can and do, jump from the animals to humans without actually harming animals - once the human immune system has been mobilised against the new virus, it enters a more stable equilibrium with its host. The pandemic passes, but the virus continues to circulate in a benign, seasonal form, provoking occasional outbreaks as it evolves through drift. It happens every few centuries and it will happen again - long before Spanish flu there was a "febris Italica" and there were two further flu pandemics in the twentieth century: the 1957 ‘Asian’ flu, which claimed 2 million lives, and the 1968 Hong Kong flu, which killed perhaps twice that. I got a little tired towards the end but in general the book kept my attention very well and I would recommend it to everybody who is curious how our situation might resolve.
