Influenza

The Influenza Pandemic of 1889-90 caused 1 million deaths, had a mortality rate of 0.15% and was the first, well documented human pandemic to occur in the modern, connected world. Known as the Asiatic flu or Russian flu (though not to be confused with 1977-78) it was originally believed that the virus was Influenza Type A subtype H2N2 but it is now asserted that it belongs to Influenza Type A subtype H3N8. 

 

Originating with an epidemic in the Russian Empire city of Bukhara (modern day Uzbekistan) during October of 1989 it was first reported a pandemic in Saint Petersburg, Russia on December 1st, 1889. Within four months it had travelled through the northern hemisphere (able to be seen in video below),generally infecting the very young and very old. The spread of the disease is attributed to the connectedness of the cities in Europe at the time, with the 19 largest European Countries (including Russia) having 202,887km of railroads between them. On top of this the Trans-Atlantic crossing took less than 6 days by boat. It is important to note that nowhere suffered severely for more than a month, or 6 weeks and within fifteen months of being discovered in October 1889 the virus had transversed the entire globe.

                                                                                           

Symptoms included those of the general flu, inflammation of respiratory passages and catarrh. The median time between the first reported case and mortality was 5 weeks but a case in St Petersburg showed how rapidly spreading and highly contagious the virus was when out of 260 male government staff, 220 fell ill in one night. By December 1890 the pandemic had finished but there were reoccurring outbreaks of the virus between 1891-1894.