At the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, and then exploded worldwide, killing as many as 100 million people. It killed more in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. It killed many more people than COVID-19, especially those who were young and otherwise healthy. This book, adapted...

Describes the 1918 influenza pandemic, from how World War I soldiers spread the disease to recent scientific efforts to understand the virus that took between twenty and forty million lives worldwide.