conditions in China lead directly to these things.

They have extremely crowded meat markets, with humans and all sorts of living creatures that will eventually become food, crammed side by side. They raise water fowl and pigs together. The two species swap influenza viruses back and forth and then happily pass them on to humans. There's a reason things like deadly influenza and now coronaviruses come out of China.

In the Middle Ages European peasants often kept their livestock in their homes. Guess what? Various things got passed back and forth between humans and livestock, resulting in all sorts of fun diseases. While I am not an advocate of never coming in touch with nature (a reasonable amount of exposure to dirt and animals helps our immune systems) there is a limit.

Those diseases gave Europeans a tremendous advantage over Native Americans.

Native Americans did not live in the kind of crowded conditions that created the European diseases that were so terrible to those who'd never been exposed to them.

Every time I read or hear condemnations of European diseases and the truly dreadful impact they had on Native Americans, I sigh and wish I had the time to explain these things. The truth is, that even if Europeans had arrived with genuinely benign intentions, and had not invaded the way they did, the European diseases would have wrecked terrible havoc and death upon the indigenous peoples. And there is absolutely NOTHING that could have been done to prevent that. Had the European discovery of the New World somehow not happened until the middle of the 20th century when far more medical knowledge was in place, and at least the smallpox vaccination was around, there still would have been a terrible disease impact on the locals.

Perhaps, had the people in the New World developed a city-based civilization and somehow created their own crowd-based diseases, they'd have inflicted similar horror on Europeans. Alas, it didn't work out that way.

And I'm not absolving Europeans from doing things like deliberately giving blankets to Native Americans that Europeans with smallpox had used and died using. The Europeans, even before the germ theory of disease was established, knew exactly what they were doing. And it was despicable.

I am totally fascinated by disease and epidemiology, and read as much as I can on these things.

But the 1917 flu has been pegged to Iowa, if memory serves. Kansas maybe. But it was in the US where it jumped from chickens to humans. Granted, back then we lived closer to the land, but we had telephones and electricity.

It then spread and became more deadly as it evolved, as viruses do.

I’m hoping this is another disease scare. Probably is.

But we are over due for a bad pandemic. It will eventually occur.

indicates that the 1918 flu may well have originated in China.

I am very well familiar with the hypothesis that it originated in Kansas, and the book The Great Influenza by John Barry is very good and well worth the read.

Here's a link to the more recent stuff about a China origin: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/

As I mentioned above, various conditions in China are perfect for diseases to evolve and spread.

that conventional wisdom.

For one thing, back in 1918-20, basic things like handwashing weren't as universal as they are now. Lots of people did not have running water or soap readily available. And even though various surveys indicate that even now a lot of people don't always wash their hands after using the toilet, or don't wash very thoroughly, it seems clear to me that handwashing is far more common than it was a hundred years ago. Again, (at the risk of repeating myself) because we almost all have running water these days.

To continue to flog this nearly dead horse, handwashing is the most important, most rudimentary, and most unacknowledged public health measure there is. If you read books, especially novels, written in the 19th century, invariably there will be a scene or two where the characters are gathering for a meal, and are reminded to wash their hands. That's because they were probably only ever washing their hands before a meal. Think about it. If you don't have ready access to soap and water, you simply don't wash your hands very often. We do many times a day.

And at the risk of being unintentionally racist or Chinese bashing or however you want to characterize it, I'm going to guess that all those Chinese people who live and sleep with all manner of animals aren't washing their hands very often. And so they're spreading all sorts of vectors that get to mingle and evolve and become nasty diseases.