[The "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1919 in La Réunion (Indian Ocean)]

Brought in by the ship Madonna, which was taking local survivors of World War I back to Reunion, the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic reached the island in March 1919 and lasted for three months. The controversies between doctors and between doctors and the colonial administrators, officials' desertion of their posts, and food shortages together caused a major panic. The epidemic appears to have ravaged people under the age of 40 and the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, at a period when the economy was already in the doldrums and the population had been declining since the late 19th century. Estimates indicate 2000 deaths in the capital of Saint-Denis, among a population of 25,000 inhabitants, and 7 to 20,000 deaths on the island as a whole, representing 4-11% of the population - far more than the 949 local soldiers killed on the battlefields of Europe. According to legend, salvation came from the sky as a small cyclone on May 11, 1919: it lasted an hour, swept away the "miasmas" and washed the island clean of all its impurities.