The devil's flu the world's deadliest influenza epidemic and the scientific hunt for the virus that caused it.

Originally published in the United Kingdom under the title "Catching Cold" in 1999 by Michael Joseph, a division of the Penguin Group.

The Devil's Flu recounts the story of this terrible forgotten tragedy and the global scientific community's effort to avert another such disaster. It remains a mystery why the 1918 outbreak was so devasting. In August 1998, scientists exhumed the bodies of seven miners buried for eighty years within the Norwegian Arctic Circle, in order to search for clues. There's a chance that their frozen graves will have preserved fragments of the 1918 virus that killed them, and that these remnants will tell us why the Spanish strain proved to be so catastrophic. As far as the next pandemic is concerned, scientists agree: It's not a question of if, but when.