 During the first years of the league, the work was essentially reactive and consisted mostly of recording information and statistics to be shared with the National Societies.The league's first operational mission was to perform onsite observations of the conditions of the victims of a typhus epidemic in Poland, and to develop and circulate information material to the surrounding countries to prevent the spread of similar epidemics diseases.The first large-scale relief action of the league came after the 1923 earthquake in Japan which killed about 200,000 people and left countless more injured and without shelter.