Kiwi professor delivers WWI lecture at London's Imperial War Museum

Dr Michael Baker, Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago. Photo / NZ Herald

A Kiwi professor will deliver a lecture at London's Imperial War Museum today on a flu pandemic that killed more people than the whole of the First World War.

The 1918-19 flu pandemic, or 'Spanish Flu', was the world's most devastating epidemic, killing more than 50 million people.

In a single year, it claimed more lives than the fourteenth century's 'Black Death' bubonic plague, and in New Zealand more than 8800 people.

But despite being New Zealand's, and the world's, worst ever disease outbreak, it's place in history has largely been overshadowed by The Great War of 1914-18.

"The pandemic was like the worst First World War battles, where you lost hundreds of people in the space of a day," said infectious disease expert Michael Baker, and professor of public health at the University of Otago, Wellington.

Professor Baker will today (Wed. night UK time) lecture on how the pandemic spread across the world with devastating results in the final months of the war as soldiers returned home.

The disease is believed to have originated in the sprawling Allied army transit camps in France in the spring of 1918.

In one of the tumultuous period's greatest tragedies, the pandemic flu killed around 930 Kiwi troops who survived the horrors of the Western Front.

While the war helped disseminate the deadly disease, Prof. Baker believes it would've reached New Zealand anyway.

It was particularly vicious for the Maori population, which suffered 42.3 deaths per thousand people - seven times higher than Europeans.

Prof. Baker believes Maori "probably had less residual immunity" across all age groups.

The effect on the burgeoning New Zealand population - at around one million - must've been "devastating", he says, especially coming on the back of 18,000 Kiwis killed in the war.

"The scale just seems unthinkable today," he said.

"I don't know how people coped with that kind of devastating experience at a societal level.

While military deaths "rightfully deserve special mention," more needs to be done to remember the effects of the flu pandemic, Prof. Baker believes.

"We haven't been very good at doing that. I don't it has received anything like the attention it deserves."

Today's lecture is the first of four that Prof. Baker will deliver during a UK visit hosted by the NZ-UK Link Foundation, a charity fostering ties between Britain and New Zealand.