tagged w/ 1918 flu
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Reports of the Ukranian mutation of the H1N1 virus spreading to other countries and Texas, Iowa, and Florida are popping up everywhere. This is it! This is the mutation our government magically warned about two years ago. Be safe and limit exposure to large crowds.Reports of the Ukranian mutation of the H1N1 virus spreading to other countries and... more
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The 1918 flu epidemic was probably the deadliest plague in human history, killing more than 50 million people worldwide. Now it appears that a small number of the deaths may have been caused not by the virus, but by a drug used to treat it: aspirin.The 1918 flu epidemic was probably the deadliest plague in human history, killing more... more
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A flu virus that killed tens of millions worldwide after it appeared in 1918 has been recreated in the virological equivalent of the Jurassic Park story. Scientists rebuilt it from pieces of genetic material retrieved from the lungs of people who died 87 years ago. Researchers writing in the journals Science and Nature say the tightly guarded replica is even more virulent than they expected.
Yet public health officials aren't worried that the 1918 flu will again terrorize the population. But scientists are interested in what it can reveal about future pandemics...
Name: The virus was at the time called the "Spanish Flu" by some. The label came from reports in the medical press that as many 8 million Spanish were killed by it in May 1918. The name is a misnomer, however, it's now thought that the 1918 flu originated in the United States.
Global Death Toll: Estimates range from 20 million to 100 million. Authors of the paper in this week's Nature say 50 million were killed in the pandemic.
Compared with Other Epidemics: The 1918 flu is thought to have killed the most people in the shortest amount of time. However, its spread was aided by modern ships and a world war that required moving huge armies quickly across the globe. The 14th-century's Black Death killed as many as 20 million in Europe alone over a period of two years. However, global population was much smaller, cities weren't as dense, and global transportation relied on wind and animal caravans; considering its high death toll, the bacteria that caused it may have been more deadly.
U.S. Death Toll: About 25 percent of the population was infected, with perhaps 650,000 people dying from the virus.
Symptoms: Normal flu symptoms of fever, nausea, aches and diarrhea. Many developed severe pneumonia attack. Dark spots would appear on the cheeks and patients would turn blue, suffocating from a lack of oxygen as lungs filled with a frothy, bloody substance.
Origins: New research reconstructing the virus suggests it began in birds, then rapidly mutated, leaping to humans.
Ground Zero: Historian John Barry believes the virus made its jump to humans in Kansas. In February 1918, recruits from Haskell County, Kan., reported for duty to Fort Riley, 300 miles away. They were already sick with influenza. Several days after they arrived, flu broke out at the camp. From there it may have spread through the Army to Europe and the rest of the world. It returned to the U.S. in a more lethal form in September 1918, making its first appearance at the Army's Camp Devens, near Boston.
The Victims: Unlike the typical flu, where the highest mortality is in infants and the elderly, the 1918 flu also struck down young, healthy adults. The military, with its overcrowded camps and troops ships, was hit hard. Few were spared: President Woodrow Wilson became ill while negotiating the Treaty of Versailles in early 1919 and had a slow recovery.
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It's not often that you find countries fighting to claim credit for the birth of an epidemic. Take syphilis, a disease which has infected millions -- man, woman and child alike. If you were in Italy when the disease first hit Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, you called it the "French pox." If you were in France, you called it the "disease of Naples." Or, you could blame it on the Native Americans. Voltaire did. He said Columbus' crew brought it back from the New World.
But when it comes to the deadliest pandemic in history, scientists from two superpowers are calling dibs rather than pointing fingers.
Everyone seems to agree that the 1918 flu epidemic, known as the "Spanish flu," didn't start in Spain. (That name probably came from the fact that only Spain was publishing news about local flu epidemics; there was a blackout on news that might lower morale in Germany, Britain and France.) American experts, such as Jeffrey Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and historian John M. Barry, back the theory that the virus, which eventually killed 50 million people, got its start in America's heartland.
The made-in-America version goes like this: Loring Miner, a Haskell County, Kansas, doctor raised the first warning, reporting an "influenza of a severe type" circulating in the area. Haskell County boys may have then carried the virus to a Kansas army camp. From there, the virus caught a ride with tens of thousands of young soldiers on their way to Europe.
John Oxford, a professor of virology at Queen Mary's School of Medicine in London, holds to a different theory: the British Empire nurtured the disease.
The British army had an enormous training camp set up in Etaples, France. On any given day, 100,000 soldiers were milling around. Many were on their way to World War I's Western Front; others, wounded, sick, and often prisoners, were on their way back. The camp had 24 hospitals alone and a team of fearful -- but curious -- pathologists. They recorded post mortems on everything that came their way. "They were worried, even at that stage, in 1916, about the possibility of infectious disease decimating the British army, as had happened in the past with typhus and cholera," says Oxford.
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What killed tens of millions of people around the world in the 1918 flu pandemic actually might not have been a flu virus. A new study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases blames different agents: bacteria.
The flu virus weakened lungs, opening the door to fatal bacterial pneumonia in most of the pandemic's 50 million victims, according to researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The researchers based their findings on preserved lung tissue from 58 soldiers who were infected by the flu and died in 1918 and 1919. They found tissue changes that are the hallmarks of bacteria, not viruses, as well as the destruction of cells that normally protect lungs from bacteria.
They also studied case reports from 1918 in which doctors said they suspected a second infection. One doctor said that the flu "condemns," but secondary infections "execute."
The new research suggests that with the availability of effective treatments for bacterial infections, a modern-day flu pandemic might not be so deadly.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Antibodies from survivors of the 1918 flu pandemic, the worst in human memory, still protect against the highly deadly virus, researchers reported on Sunday.
The findings by a team of influenza and immune system experts suggest new and better ways to fight viruses -- especially new pandemic strains that emerge and spread before a vaccine can be formulated.
These survivors, now aged 91 to 101, all lived through the pandemic as children.
Their immune systems still carry a memory of that virus and can produce proteins called antibodies that kill the 1918 flu strain with surprising efficiency, the researchers report in the journal Nature.
"It was very surprising that these subjects would still have cells floating in their blood so long afterward," said Dr. James Crowe of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, who helped lead the study.
The antibodies also protected mice from the 1918 virus, which swept around the world at the end of World War One killing between 50 million and 100 million people, Crowe's team reports in the journal Nature.
"The antibodies that we isolated are remarkable antibodies. They grab onto the virus very tightly and they virtually never fall off," Crowe said in a telephone interview.
"That allows them to kill the 1918 virus with extreme potency, meaning it takes a very small amount of antibody."
Story continued at link...WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Antibodies from survivors of the 1918 flu pandemic, the worst... more
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