The Untreatable
London Review of Books
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n02/gavin-francis/the-untreatable
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The flu wasn’t Spanish at all. The name stuck when in May 1918 the Spanish king, the prime minister and his entire cabinet all came down with it. In Madrid, it was known as the Naples Soldier after a catchy tune then in circulation, while French military doctors called it Disease 11. In Senegal it was Brazilian flu; in Brazil it was German flu. Poles called it the Bolshevik Disease and the Persians thought the British were responsible (Spinney writes about its devastating effect on the city of Mashed, where it probably arrived with a Russian soldier from the north).
As to the original source of the pandemic, there are three chief candidates: Kansas poultry farms, the army barracks of Etaples in northern France, and the Shansi province in China.