Why is the 1918 flu called 'Spanish' if it didn't start in Spain?
In 1918, a Spanish official wrote, baffled: 'wherefore Spanish?' The pandemic didn't start in Spain; Spain was simply where newspapers were allowed to report it.
▶ Start the storyBecause of wartime censorship. The 1918–1920 flu pandemic broke out near the end of World War I, when censors in the warring countries suppressed bad news to protect morale. Spain was neutral and had no wartime propaganda machine, so its newspapers reported the epidemic freely, which made Spain look like its center. The outbreak did not originate there: the earliest probable cases were documented in March 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas, and limited data still leave the pandemic's true origin uncertain.
Mar 1918
Earliest probable cases, Haskell County, Kansas
2 Jun 1918
The Times: 'The Spanish Epidemic'
Late Jun 1918
'Everybody thinks of it as the Spanish influenza'
Oct 1918
A Spanish official: 'wherefore Spanish?'
2015
WHO lists 'Spanish flu' as a name to avoid
The name spread fast. On 2 June 1918, The Times of London ran a dispatch from Madrid titled 'The Spanish Epidemic', reporting over 100,000 victims of an unknown disease; three weeks later it wrote that 'everybody thinks of it as the Spanish influenza to-day'. Censorship elsewhere was so effective that Spain's own health officials did not know their neighbors were affected too. In October 1918, a Spanish official protested in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association: 'And wherefore Spanish? ...this epidemic was not born in Spain.'
Spain wasn't the only country handed the blame. French newspapers first said 'American flu', then switched to 'Spanish flu' to avoid offending an ally. British soldiers said 'Flanders flu' and German soldiers 'Flandern-Fieber', after a Belgian battlefield where many on both sides fell ill. Senegal said 'Brazilian flu', Brazil 'German flu', Poland 'Bolshevik disease', and Japan blamed sumo wrestlers back from Taiwan. The pandemic itself was one of the deadliest in history, infecting about 500 million people and killing between 17 and 50 million, possibly 100 million. Since 2015, World Health Organization guidelines list 'Spanish flu' among disease names to avoid, to prevent stigma.
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Recap
The flu's name came from where it was first freely reported, Spain, not from where it actually started, which remains uncertain to this day.
Surprising fact · Spanish health officials were themselves surprised to learn the 'Spanish flu' was devastating other countries too, since wartime censorship elsewhere had hidden that news.
Sources (1)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (13 claims) cites at least one of these.