Patriarch of Pandemics

&gt; The Great War destroyed the stability of a generation, and took 20 million lives<p>That&#x27;s an understatement. Rather two or three generations, since the Second World War is pretty much a direct consequence of how the First one ended.

&gt; The 1918 pandemic, deadly as it was, is still around today in the form of a mutated seasonal flu. Following global exposure and culling of the most vulnerable populations - middle aged adults that were most affected by the negative effects of the war - the lethality of the virus is significantly less.<p>OK, but was there some kind of seasonal flu before that? That is the real question to me.

Do babies inherit the developed immune systems of their parents? If not, how do the gained resistances from survivors pass on to the next generation?

If so, then over the next 100 years it has killed many more than 40M.

It&#x27;s fantastic to me that pandemics were possible many centuries ago, though maybe the definition applied is different than to a current outbreak.<p>&gt; The outbreak of influenza reported in 1173 is not considered to be a pandemic, and other reports to 1500 generally lack reliability. The outbreak of 1510 is probably a pandemic reported with spreading from Africa to engulf Europe. The outbreak of 1557 is possibly a pandemic. The first influenza pandemic agreed by all authors occurs in 1580.

Following links gets you to this article which tries to explain that the Neolithic decline happened also because of a plague.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neolithic_decline" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neolithic_decline</a>

Very interesting how in a matter of days, the Spanish flu has been renamed to the 1918 flu. Cancel culture writ large. It’s actually impressive.