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The Spanish Flu of 1918 was (17) .......... the most devastating pandemic of the modern era, widely considered to have claimed more lives than the (18) .......... First World War, which concluded in the same year.
The virus acquired its misleading name not because it originated in Spain. The belligerent nations of the conflict were uniformly reluctant to acknowledge so debilitating an illness within their own (19) .......... , fearing that any such admission might be construed as evidence of weakness. As a result, news of the outbreak went largely (20) .......... beyond their borders. Spain, being neutral, had no such reason for concealment and became the first country to report the outbreak publicly. The virus therefore acquired its name from a nation that was, (21) .......... , merely the most honest about its existence.
The pandemic reached every inhabited corner of the globe, devastating communities from Western Samoa to Alaska with equal ferocity. (22) .......... compiled estimates suggest that between 50 and 100 million people perished as a consequence.
To place this in perspective: across four years of the First World War, an estimated 16 million military (23) .......... lost their lives, and the conflict as a whole is thought to have killed a (24) .......... 37 million people — a figure that the death toll of the Spanish Flu nonetheless far surpassed.