Why the 1918 pandemic is called the Spanish flu

Spain was neutral in the First World War, so Spanish newspapers were free to report an epidemic the belligerent powers were censoring. The disease acquired the name of the only country that published it. The same openness left Spain with one of the best-documented national mortality records of the pandemic — between about 195,000 and 238,000 excess deaths, now a standard dataset for reconstructing 1918.