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[QUOTE="Bob Godfrey, post: 52595, member: 136612"]
The 1918 outbreak was a true pandemic, with worldwide devastation.  The total death roll can only be estimated, but was perhaps 5% of everybody living on the planet.  It certainly killed more people than did the 1914-18 Great War.  And a  very much higher number contracted the disease and survived but were bedridden perhaps for weeks, so the impact on family and national incomes was considerable. It's rather surprising that so few of the Titanic survivors succumbed to the 'flu pandemic, but  very likely that a lot more of them (and their families) suffered from it in one way or another.    
 
In most cases the actual cause of death was pneumonia, contracted as a secondary infection which nowadays would be relatively easy to treat.  In Europe the number of deaths in Britain and France together was at least equal to the numbers for the US (which had a much larger population), and in some island and other isolated communities there was anything up to 100% mortality.  Relatively small numbers, however, compared with that other great Pandemic, the Black Death, which killed (depending on your favoured research estimates) anything up to two-thirds of the population of Europe.
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