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Bird flu outbreak letter auction
A remarkable letter giving a chilling warning on the devastation of a bird flu pandemic will go under the hammer in Ludlow.
The letter was written in 1918 in South Africa and provides considerable details on what happened when the so-called ?Spanish Flu? hit the country just before the end of the World War I.
It will go for auction at a specialist sale of historical documents by Mullock?s Auctioneers at Ludlow Racecourse on Thursday.
Richard Westwood-Brookes, the company?s documents expert, said: ?The flu pandemic which hit the world in 1918/19 killed more people in a few months than were killed throughout the entire four years of the carnage of World War I.
?This letter, written by a young Englishman named Harry Whellock to his mother back home provides vital evidence of actually what happened. It stands as a chilling warning to us all as to what can take place if a fatal strain of Bird Flu were to take hold.?
In his letter, Whellock says that very few households escaped the disease and many families were wiped out.
He adds: ?Cape Town alone had over 5,000 deaths in two weeks and the total for the five weeks including natives and coloured was over thirteen thousand deaths.
?There are between two and three thousand orphans who have lost their parents through the epidemic.
?The burials mounted up to over three hundred a day.
?The undertakers could not meet the sudden demand for coffins and hundreds were buried in long trenches just wrapped in blankets or sacking?I have seen sights I have never seen before and never want to see again, of motor lorries loaded up with dead, carts of all sorts taking bodies to the cemetery.?
The letter could fetch up to ?700.
http://www.shropshirestar.com/2007/10/bird-flu-outbreak-letter-auction/