The next flu would be more deadly than the Spanish flu and could kill 400 million people

The flu season is fast approaching and there seems to be a new strain of flu we need to worry about.

As the weather cools and the leaves fall from the trees, our bodies must adapt to the sudden change.

However, sometimes our body is slow to adapt and we end up catching diseases much faster than in hot weather.

Now, it seems that there is a new flu sweeping the globe and that it is said to be more lethal than the Spanish flu.

One hundred years ago, the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed tens of millions of people – but nothing prevents the flu virus from becoming deadly again.

Influenza is an "unstable" virus, which means that it changes from year to year and that a major mutation is enough for the virus to devastate the globe.

Professor Robert Dingwall, influenza expert at the University of Nottingham Trent, said modern medicine would not be able to protect us from a new pandemic.

During the 1918 pandemic, between 200,000 and 250,000 people died in the UK, or about 60 to 100 million people worldwide.

For every person in Britain who died, 10 others fell ill, devastating the country and destroying the economy.

"If it were repeated today, we would look somewhere between three quarters of a million and a million people [in the UK] – That's why people are worried about it, "said Professor Dingwall at The Sun Online.

"If you think of your 60 million people [currently in the UK] and you take 10 million [people who could get sick] you can see how difficult it is to maintain public services and even keep things like supermarkets stored.

"Globally, in 1918, there is a reasonable consensus that up to 100 million people have died.

"By order of magnitude, it would be about 400 million today.

"This is one of the biggest challenges facing a developed country – how will we continue in a civil and orderly way?"

"Pandemic infection is really considered the number one risk by the government, there is terrorism; storms; hurricanes; natural disasters; but the big problem remains "what would happen if a new infectious disease struck the population".

Although it seems hard to believe, the threat of another influenza pandemic is not as obvious as you think.

Professor Dingwall said, "There may be reason to believe that the 1918 pandemic was the outer limit of what the flu might possibly reach, but there is no guarantee that it can not be replicated at this scale."

"Modern medicine would not have much impact on the death rate as a result of the 1918 attack.

"The flu is a very unstable virus, so it changes a little bit from year to year, so the vaccine has to be reformulated every year.

"But from time to time, there is really a big change, which happened in 1918, so there is no resistance in the population because no one has ever seen anything like it and that is Is the main reason why so many people have died. "

He explained that for a pandemic to occur, it takes a "radical change" in the flu virus – something we can expect to see around every 20 to 40 years – or once in a generation.

The last pandemic occurred in 2009-2010 when swine flu appeared in Mexico, while the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic claimed the lives of 100 million people – infecting a third of the world's population.

Dr. Jonathan Quick, president of the World Health Council, said the flu virus was "the most evil, the most difficult to control and the fastest known viral killer of humanity".

In the Daily Mail, he warned of famine, low drug stocks, the degradation of energy systems under pressure and the collapse of the global economy if a flu pandemic hit again.

"The most likely culprit will be an unprecedented new mutation of the flu virus. Conditions are good, it could happen tomorrow, "he said.

Although modern medicine may be powerless in the fight to protect the world against another influenza pandemic, we have made enough progress to protect against secondary infections such as pneumonia.

Very young people, the elderly and people with pre-existing health problems are the most likely to develop secondary infections due to the flu.

Most people who die after contracting the flu are killed by secondary infections rather than the flu virus.

"If something like this happened today, the virus would still kill people in large numbers, but what we would be able to control is the bacterial infections that attach to it", added Professor Dingwall.

"For example, many of the deaths in 1918 were people who contracted the flu and developed bacterial pneumonia, but that could be treated with the antibiotics we currently have.

"The main cause of death due to influenza could not be treated because the antivirals we have are very limited in effectiveness and there is nothing in the hope of being able to change that.

"And we could not count on vaccination because with the current technology, it would take about four to six months to identify the virus and create a vaccine that would have a real impact."