June 28, 1914. Probably the saddest anniversary for the human race.

[starroute]

14. And the Spanish flu epidemic, which killed more people than the war

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic

The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus. It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population[3] —making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. . . .

To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States; but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII), creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit — thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu. . . .

Investigative work by a British team led by virologist John Oxford[13] of St Bartholomew's Hospital and the Royal London Hospital, identified a major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France as almost certainly being the center of the 1918 flu pandemic. . . .

The close quarters and massive troop movements of World War I hastened the pandemic and probably both increased transmission and augmented mutation; the war may also have increased the lethality of the virus.