A DEADLY flu pandemic like the Spanish flu could happen again, wiping out 400 million globally, leading flu experts have warned.
It's 100 years since the 1918 pandemic killed tens of millions of people - yet there's nothing stopping the flu virus becoming just as deadly again.
![Spanish flu wiped out tens of millions of people across the globe when it hit in 1918]()
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The flu is an "unstable" virus, meaning it changes from year to year, and all it would take is a major mutation for the virus to devastate the globe.
Professor Robert Dingwall, a flu expert at Nottingham Trent University, said modern medicine would be powerless to protect us in the face of a new pandemic.
During the 1918 pandemic between 200,000 and 250,000 people died in the UK - around 60 to 100 million globally.
For every person in Britain that died another 10 fell ill, devastating the country and crippling the economy.
Susanna Reid wears a medical mask as sick Piers Morgan wheezes and sniffles beside her on Good Morning Britain
![If a pandemic like the Spanish flu were to sweep the globe again it would be worse, killing more people]()
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![For every one person who died another 10 fell ill during the 1918 pandemic, experts say]()
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7"If that was repeated today we would be looking at somewhere between three quarters of a million to one million people [in the UK] - that's why people are worried about it," Prof Dingwall told The Sun Online.
"If you think of your 60 million people [currently in the UK] and you take 10 million [people who could get sick] out of that you can see how difficult it is to keep public services running and even keep things like the supermarkets stocked.
"Globally, in 1918, there's a reasonable consensus that up to 100 million people died.
"In order of magnitude, it would be around 400 million today.
![For a pandemic to happen there needs to be a 'dramatic shift' in the flu virus - something we can expect to see roughly every 20 to 40 years]()
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"It's one of the biggest challenges facing a developed country - how would we keep going in a civil and orderly fashion?"
"Pandemic infection is really seen as number one risk by the Government, there's terrorism; storms; hurricanes; natural disasters; but the big concern is still 'what would happen if we had a new infectious disease hit the population'."
It may all seem a bit far fetched - like the scenes of a horror film - but even though the threat of another pandemic isn't imminent, it's not impossible.
"There might be some reason to think that the 1918 pandemic was the outer limit of what the flu can possibly achieve, but there is absolutely no guarantee that it couldn't be reproduced on that scale," Prof Dingwall said.
Of those who caught the flu during the 1918 pandemic, most died of secondary infections like bacterial pneumonia![Pandemic infection is considered one of the biggest threats to mankind by governments across the globe]()
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"Modern medicine wouldn't have much of an impact on the death rate from something like the 1918 attack.
"Flu is a very unstable virus, so it changes a little bit from one year to the next which is why the vaccine has to be reformulated every year.
"But every once in a while there is a really big change, which is what happened in 1918, so there is no resistance in the population because nobody has ever seen anything like it before and that's the main reason why so many people died."
He explained for a pandemic to happen there needs to be a "dramatic shift" in the flu virus - something we can expect to see roughly every 20 to 40 years - or once in a generation.
The last pandemic hit in 2009-10 when swine flu emerged in Mexico, while the deadly Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 claimed up to 100 million lives - infecting a third of the world's population.
![It would take four to six months for modern day medicine to identify the virus and create a vaccine to protect against it - by then millions could have died]()
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Dr Jonathan Quick, chair of the Global Health Council, said the flu virus is "the most diabolical, hardest-to-control, and fastest-spreading potential viral killer known to humankind".
He warned in The Daily Mail of starvation, medicine supplies running low, energy systems crippling under the pressure and the collapse of the global economy if a flu pandemic was to hit again.
"The most likely culprit will be a new and unprecedentedly deadly mutation of the influenza virus. The conditions are right, it could happen tomorrow," he said.
While modern medicine may be powerless in the fight to protect the world from another flu pandemic, we have made enough advances to protect against secondary infections like pneumonia.
The very young, elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions are the most vulnerable to developing secondary infections from the flu.
Most people who die after contracting the flu are killed by secondary infections rather than the flu virus itself.
"If we had something like that happen today the virus would still kill people in very large numbers, but what we would be able to control is the bacterial infections that piggyback on it," Prof Dingwall added.
"For example, quite a few of the deaths in 1918 were people who contracted the influenza and then developed bacterial pneumonia - but that could be treated with the antibiotics we have now.
"The primary cause of death from influenza couldn't be treated because the antivirals we have are of quite limited effectiveness and there is nothing in the pipeline to be able to change that.
"And we couldn't rely on vaccination because with present technology it would take about four to six months to identify the virus and create a vaccine that would have any real impact."
(thesun.co.uk)