Geoffrey Rice
One hundred years ago this month New Zealand suffered its worst peacetime disaster and its greatest public health crisis. It had taken four years of the First World War to kill 18,000 New Zealand soldiers, but in the space of only two months an estimated 9,000 New Zealanders, mostly civilians, died from the pneumonic complications of pandemic influenza. Pakeha (Europeans) died at the rate of 5.8 per 1000, but the indigenous Maori population died at almost eight times that rate, or 49 per 1000. Doctors at the time estimated that about half the population caught the flu, and most recovered, but some small towns suffered almost 90 per cent morbidity and when there were too few able-bodied adults to organise care for the sick, high death rates resulted.