THE lightning spread of Sars brings grim echoes of the greatest world pandemic, the 1918 flu scourge.

Like Sars it happened during a time of war and was helped on its way by mass travel — of troops, not tourists. It killed about 2.5 per cent of those who caught it, roughly the same as Sars.

It infected one billion people, half the world’s population, and killed between 20 and 40 million, a figure that exceeds the bubonic plague in the 14th century and smallpox in the 16th, and is challenged only by today’s Aids pandemic.

The first case to be traced was a young army private, Albert Mitchell, at Camp Funston, Kansas, in March 1918. By the end of the week 500 soldiers at the camp were ill.

Mitchell may not have been the first case but he was the first recorded. Tracking of epidemics owes its birth to the 1918 flu outbreak.

This first wave killed relatively few. Something changed during the spring, perhaps in the trenches of France, to make the virus far more dangerous.

The second wave, which swept through Europe during the spring and summer of 1918 and returned to the US with the troops towards the end of the year, was much deadlier.

In October 1918, the worst month for the epidemic in the US, 195,000 Americans died, many of them between 20 and 40, the age range who suffered most.

Today we have far better tools to trace the spread of Sars, and more sophisticated treatments; but we also have airlines to hasten its spread.

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