Yung-Ching Liu1 Cheng-Ju Tsai1 Kuan-Wei Chen1,*
Department of Chinese Medicine of MacKay Memorial Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
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Throughout history, there have been many influenza pandemics, with the 1918 influenza pandemic being the most severe outbreak in the 20th century. The 1918 influenza pandemic, also called "Spanish Flu", was exceptionally severe, killed an estimated 30–50 million people worldwide, exceeding the lives World War I claimed. Considering Spanish flu killed more people than any pandemic disease before or since, including the medieval Black Death, it is often mentioned in articles about pandemics in recent history. While tremendous advances have been made in medicine and medical technology, intermittent plague outbreaks still recorded from the 20th to the 21st Century, such as the 1957–1958 Asian flu pandemic, Hong Kong flu of 1968, and H1N1 influenza in 2009. Even nowadays, Covid-19 is continuing to spread around the world, causing great mortality and healthcare burden. Therefore, by reviewing the record in Taiwan through the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was a book written by a Chinese medicine doctor during Japanese colonial period, we can learn the experience of predecessor, and analyze the contribution of traditional Chinese medicine in global pandemics
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