My grandfather William Ahern (Papa Bill) travelled to England in 1917 to fight for the British empire. As fate would determine, he spent many months fighting but it wasn’t the type of combat he’d first envisaged when he set sail on the months-long voyage to the UK.

The mud-sodden trenches on the Western Front were a far cry from where he spent the remainder of World War 1. Most of his time abroad he was confined to a London hospital bed battling several life-threatening ailments.

Soon after arriving in the Old Dart he was admitted to hospital for severe asthma which he’d had on and off for much of his life. No sooner had he recovered from the asthma attack he caught pneumonia. Many weeks later and about to be released from hospital his body was ravaged by the Spanish Flu.

Three strikes and you’re out! Not Papa Bill. Despite his previous run-ins with asthma and pneumonia, he recovered from the Spanish flu and amazingly of all the flu-ridden soldiers in his hospital ward he was the sole survivor. He was fortunate. According to estimates the Spanish Flu infected around 500 million people worldwide and killed between 50 and 100 million in 2017/18.

No one in my family could explain how someone who was so sickly with as many health issues as Papa Bill could survive a disease that was so lethal for so many. His strong faith in God may have played a role, along with some sheer luck. We will never know. That Papa Bill, my dad’s father, survived is the reason my five siblings and I are here today. Fate can be an extraordinary thing.

We like to joke that Papa Bill’s best genes and antibodies were passed down to our generation. It may be a fallacy but it makes for a good story amongst family and friends and gives some comfort during the cold winter months when the flu season peaks. While we haven’t seen anything quite like the Spanish Flu in my lifetime, medical experts are quite vocal at this time of the year, chorusing the need for people to get the flu jab.

Last season’s flu outbreak was one of the deadliest on record and the effectiveness of the flu shot was the subject of many media reports. The H3N2 influenza spread to other parts of the world and while the virus had been around for some time in one form or another, it was unfairly dubbed the ‘Aussie’ flu by the British and US media.

Experts have long warned of the distinct possibility of another pandemic, as bad or worse than the Spanish Flu. People are encouraged to be inoculated if they are over 65, or have certain conditions like asthma, diabetes, heart or lung disease, a weak immune system and cancer. The flu can also be serious for young people and such was the intensity of last year’s outbreak, there have been calls for children to receive free flu shots which some states have authorised.

I have been getting the flu jab for about 10 years now. While not normally prone to the flu and while injections have never been a favourite, I figure the advantages far out way any disadvantages. As the old idiom goes, ‘better safe than sorry!’

While Papa Bill survived the Spanish flu, on his return to Adelaide his doctor suggested he take up smoking to help his asthma. He passed away at the relatively young age of 62: no doubt the smoking didn’t help!