The 1957 Flu Pandemic (BBC World Service)

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In 1957 a new strain of flu emerged in East Asia and quickly spread around the world, killing a million people. It was dubbed the "Asian flu" but it spread as far as Europe and North and South America.

To create this edition of Witness History I trawled through archive news reports from the time and spoke to Sumi Krishna, who was nine years old when she caught the virus in India in 1957.

Listen to the episode in full here