Doctors might save you from injuries inflicted on the battlefield but they had little to offer these victims. There are pitiful stories on every page, beginning with Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet who, having survived the trenches and surgery to remove shrapnel from his brain, succumbed weeks later to flu. The title of Pale Rider is taken from Revelation and the apocalyptic “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, an African-American spiritual in which the rider’s name is Death. Bloated corpses clogged rivers bells never ceased tolling for the dead and smoke blocked out the sunlight for days as the unburied were cremated in huge funeral pyres. There had been pandemics before, notably the Russian flu of the 1890s, which killed a million people, but nothing on this extraordinary scale. She charts the hysteria that broke out during the three waves of infection (the second being the most deadly) which swept across the globe. Spinney, an admired science journalist, conjures the drama of the Spanish flu when “your best chance of survival was to be utterly selfish” and “jealously guard your hoard of food and water, and ignore all pleas for help”. In the case of the variant that came to be called the Spanish flu, the viral infection triggered a cytokine storm in some victims, a massive inflammatory response throughout the lungs that was hugely damaging to the host. Photograph: BSIP/UIG via Getty Imagesīut the flu virus also shows a propensity to mutate and generate variants hence the need to manufacture new vaccines each year for seasonal outbreaks. Virus H1N1, responsible for the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918-19. Antibodies are triggered and immune cells rush to the site of infection, releasing viral-killing cytokine chemicals a consequent local inflammation is perhaps a small price to be paid by the host. Once reproduction is complete, the replicated virus must leave the host, be carried in the air, and infect another, if it is to thrive.įlu’s symptoms represent the body’s immune response to the viral invasion. In human hosts the desired cells are those lining the lung. We now know that the flu virus is a parasite that needs the host cell of another living organism in order to reproduce. There were no tools available to identify the invisible agent of disease. Its victims reported dizziness, fevers, lethargy and coughing up blood for at least two out of every 100 people who caught the bug, the outcome, within weeks, was death especially vulnerable were those aged between 20 and 40. At the end of the war, among weakened soldiers and undernourished populations, flu appeared as a shocking and unheralded visitor, and spread with alarming speed.

Pale Rider sets out to change this it’s both a saga of tragedies and a detective story.

Pale rider