Rabindranath Tagore And The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

A ship carrying Indian troops from World War I docked at the port of Bombay on 29 May 1918.

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With it secretly arrived the H1N1 influenza virus. Soon it spread across Bombay and travelled by train to the rest of the country. The “war fever”, as this new disease was then called, killed about 18 million people until the end of 1920 in India alone. No other country suffered such a high number of casualties. This number exceeded even the total number of lives lost in the War. The situation was exacerbated by negligence on the part of the colonial rulers, who did nothing to provide people with food in the face of a famine caused by drought. Reckless swindling of food grains out of India only made the rapidly deteriorating situation much worse. There were very few doctors to attend to the ailing as most of them were on War duty. The dying died with nearly no help.