Researchers unlock secrets of 1918 flu pandemic

Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers have found out what made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly -- a group of three genes that lets the virus invade the lungs and cause pneumonia.

They mixed samples of the 1918 influenza strain with modern seasonal flu viruses to find the three genes and said their study might help in the development of new flu drugs.

The discovery, published in Tuesday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could also point to mutations that might turn ordinary flu into a dangerous pandemic strain.

Most flu experts agree that a pandemic of influenza will almost certainly strike again. No one knows when or what strain it will be but one big suspect now is the H5N1 avian influenza virus.



Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE4BS56420081229?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews

I wonder which disaster movie script they'll follow?

Every time they discover something new they exploit it, to our detriment.

Bio Terrorism

may the creators reap what they sow

...and managed to resurrect the strain that way.

perhaps they are trying to prevent something that is going to happen anyway?

Man, am I becoming jaded?

Scientific research isn't a good enough reason to wear a tin foil hat.

They did what they could at the time to control it but to no avail....

and the efforts to control it.

I wish I still had the text.

Schools were closed world wide. Travel was curtailed. Quarantine was normal. And still millions died.

If it happens again, don't count on the pharma companies to help at all.

1. The medicines you are accustomed to taking, like antibiotics, have absolutely no effect whatsoever on viruses and that includes all forms of influenza. The reason for this is devastatingly simple. Viruses are not really living things at all until they get inside you and use your cells to live. They cannot carry on any metabolic functions or reproduce without inhabiting your individual cells to do it. This leaves very limited opportunities and means for killing the parasitic virus without killing you. Scientists around the world have been working hard on this for decades, including the pharmaceutical company scientists.

2. One of the biggest problems with "big pharma" is that they're not willing to work on drugs they don't think they'll have enough market for. What market could be larger than the entire, desperate world? I actually thing they'd be tripping over each other to get in on this - for the profit factor and also for the PR value. They would all want to be the drug company that "saved the planet."

The discovery of recent studies of the 1918 flu is that it killed by making the victim much, much more susceptible to a secondary infection of bacterial pneumonia. In other words, it was the secondary infection, as often as the viral infection, that killed.

So if we were hit by the 1918 flu, anti-biotics would, indeed, have a tremendously positive effect because they would prevent the secondary bacterial infection, even though they have no direct effect on viruses.

That's really what the recent breakthroughs viz the 1918 flu are about.

I hold a decidedly darker view of what would happen, were the 1918 flu to revisit us. The increased mobility of our species alone is likely to increase the virulence............ it's not a pretty picture.

the one made by Rumsfeld's company? I think it was Gilead who makes it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilead_Sciences

pharmas, governments, civil orgs, medical associations, etc, would all be hard pressed to combat it.

The earth, one day, will shrug us off like a bad cold.

we just inhabit the planet. The planet is the host.

and been amazed at the number of graves from 1918. Babies especially.

...and confirmed with my living aunt that he died during the 1918 pandemic.

He was a healthy young man. Left my grandmother with two very small children to raise, as a single mom living in the South.

Thanks for posting the story.

I too worry that research (whether nuclear, anthrax or other bioweaponry) can be stolen or bought by those with nefarious agendas. Foreigners. Or, um, corrupt governments.

was a nurse in Beloit, Wisconsin at the time. At the time, there was not much they could do for the victims.

My aunt has told me that grandma told her that all they could really do was the give the patients shot glasses of whiskey, as it kept their airways open.

He was 28 years old. He died 3 days before my father's 4th birthday and 16 days before my aunt was born. She never saw her father. My grandmother was suddenly a 23 year old, 8 1/2 month pregnant widow. One on the way and a 4 year old. Not many job opportunities for women in those days. My grandfather was a volunteer fireman, got wet fighting a fire, caught the flu, dies a day or two later. I don't think that my father ever recovered from that. His not having a father impacted his ability to be a very good one.

The flu pandemic of 1918 killed more people that both WW1 and WW2 combined. It was most deadly to people in their prime. Usually the survivors were children and elderly. Mind blowing.

Only six of them lived to grow up. I used to go to the cemetery with my grandmother (her "job" as a kid was to cut the grass there) and it was heartbreaking to see the rows of little stones. My grandmother pointed out that most of them were around the same age. She said that it often happened at the time of "weaning," back then. I guess that meant that they didn't yet have pasteurized milk... :-(

had 16 children - 14 lived into healthy adulthood. What a difference a few generations made.

Your grandmother's grandmother most likely gave up breast feeding for the newest child, leaving the older one without the benefits of breast milk. It is really sad to think about the suffering and fears of the generations before ours. Makes our problems, at least on a personal level, seem small at times.

edit: multiple typos

country, back in the 1600s. They were Dutch. I used to pour over it and it was so very sad. They had a huge number of children but so many of them died very young. ;(

Though my great-grandfather, the eldest, was over 20 years older than his youngest brother who lived. Only boys survived. Unusual. :shrug:

The other odd thing is that it was mainly the older ones who lived to grow up. :shrug:

And it sure does make our problems seem small. The one that always gets to me is the tiny stone that says Robert/LeRoy. They were twins... ;(

During the 1918 pandemic, she lost three little ones within two weeks. One was eight years old.

Later on, she lost a son in during WWII.

All of this happened before I was born.

It took me years to find out all of this. Afterwards, I felt I understood why she always seemed so cold and "closed off".

she had the flu in 1918. Basically, she was in a coma and the physician had told her parents that time was just go8ng to play out.But one day she woke up. For the rest of her life her first memory was her older sister looking at her face and yelling that she was awake. She lost all memory of the first 8 years of her life, had to re-learn how to walk, talk, eat, everything.

I would imagine that losing your children like that would send most women round the bend, like Mary Todd Lincoln. My grandmother was very close to her, told me a lot about her. This was her father's mother. I crossed paths with my great-grandfather, her father, by a year. We were all the eldest. And the reason that my Nana was close to and often lived with her grandmother was that her own mother died when she was 13. Her brother was eight. I think she said it was Rheumatic Fever. This was in 1913. ;(

However, my grandmother lived until two weeks before her 98th birthday. :-) We had the funeral on that day. I still miss her everyday. She practically raised me, her and my Dad. ;( And her brother lived until 91. He was the nicest man on earth, amazing, considering all that he went through when he was so young... His step-mother threw him out of the house at nine. She didn't like boys... ;(

mothers pass their immune system (immunoglobbulin I think it's called-been a while) via breast milk. After weaning-kids build their own immune system. I did a paper on the pandemic (my professor wanted me to develop it into a thesis-but I wasn't interested at the time.

I work as a school Nurse and despite all our precautions and teaching-parents send their kids to school sick-masquerading fevers with tylenol and exposing the entire class to all kinds of infectious diseases. People have forgotten basic common sense and community health practices. We are ripe for a pandemic. We were lucky SARS hit Canada first. Their health care system was excellent in identifying, containing, and treating the disease. It could have been much worse.

rewarding children who never miss a day of school by special treats every quarter, and public recognition at the end of each year?

While I agree that attendance at school is important, at least in my school the message is very mixed. Don't send your child to school when s/he is sick, but if you don't send your child to school when s/he is sick she misses out on the perfect attendance breakfast each quarter and the end of year recognition.

My Polish grandmother was a little older and she remembers when they used to "bleed" people... x(

That sounds like a fascinating topic. I wish that I'd asked my grandmother more... :-(

The other reason that sick kids come to school is that both parents probably work. They have to. :-(

In the past, the woman's job was to stay home and raise the kids. My grandmother told me about when she and her neighbor/best friend had whooping cough at the same time. Sounds like they were laid up for weeks, but their mothers were home to look after them. My grandmother also told me that her mother was the one who people would call when they were sick or giving birth. We're talking rural upstate NY. She'd race there on a horse. :-) She apparently was asked to name many babies, but you wouldn't believe the names! x( ;)

But she died in 1913, of some kind of fever. My grandmother was 13 and her brother was eight. She told me the story many times. ;(

And you're sure right. I've seen "Sicko..." :-(

first to go.

Whole divisions were deathly ill and were completely unable to fight let alone stand.

an odd thought: if there was no Flu, would have Germany won? and if so, there probably wouldn't have been a hitler.

many other major factors also come into play, but the flu did play a major role in recruiting and the actual percentage of healthy soldiers.

it hit the healthy the hardest-folks that usually would survive. Young adults and middle age were hit hard. No one had seen this age group hit as hard as the Spanish flu. This age group would get sick but survive. They didn't this time.

"Wickett's Remedy" paints a great picture of living through the pandemic, and at one of the studies to isolate the strain.

against avian flu, except we will probably lose less due to more modern medical help we can have now.

so I've been very interested in it. Poor things.

nt

But, I can't trust anymore.

His parents died within days of each other. However he and his 5 sisters were spared. Go figure!

...while sparing children and seniors (because they had weaker immune systems).

I think there was a movie about 20 years ago called Awakenings. I did not see it (Robin Williams was in it).

Completely fascinating and tragic.

My grandfather survived the 1918 flu. He was 15 at the time. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's when my dad was still in high school in the early '50's. He died of a stroke related to Parkinson's in 1969. I wonder it there's a relationship between the flu and his Parkinson's.

An outbreak of Encephalitis lethargica that occurred between 1916-1926. That had to be a very bad time to live in cities. First you had the Spanish flu pandemic followed by the peak years of the Encephalitis epidemic.

My maternal grandparents lived in a small town in North Dakota where my grandfather was teaching high school.

My grandmother told of two incidents from the epidemic. One was of a young elementary school teacher, just out of college on her first job, who died of the flu in just a couple of days.

The other was of a farm family. One day, someone noticed that this family had not made their customary weekend trip into town for two weeks. Some people went out to their farm to check and found the whole family, parents and three children, dead.

One of the mutations that made the 1918 flu so devastating was that it specifically attacked T-Cells, so the stronger your immune system, the more cells it had to attack, which then weakened you even further for other diseases.

Exactly as you said--the stronger your immune system, the more the flu fought.

That's just...scary.

...is that during the bird-flu hype, Tamiflu was discussed a great deal in the media. It was touted as
the only drug on Earth that could save you from the bird flu.

Even at the doctor's office, the doctors and nurses were pushing it. They would bring it up in conversation
if you went into the doctor's office with a virus that they suspected might be the flu. I remember because
this happened to me. It's as if someone flipped a PR switch--and the media--in conjunction with the doctors--
began marketing Tamiflu to the nation.

Bush even talked about bird flu in one of his speeches and talked about the potential "national emergency" that
bird flu could create.

And as you mentioned, Rumsfeld had his hand in this. He was on the board of the company that manufactures
Tamiflu.

Now...you hear nothing from the media. Nothing from the President. Nothing about it from the doctor's
office...even when you do have the flu or a virus. I guess the dollars that they needed to make...were made?

Is it possible that we are being played big time and that these criminals launch a PR campaign every time
they need to make some bucks? I wonder how many times this has happened.

nt

...your post #3, and some of it was directed to you, and your statement.

:)

;)

in China there were indiginous reports being leaked thru the 'net that Chinese troops were cordoning off communities because of Bird Flu...and the Chinese government was very uncooperative, during the first season, of sharing information with the WHO.

And the WHO was pissed about it because they were having difficulty assesing the seriousness of the outbreak.

There was an independent site, run by a doctor, that was a clearing house for information, but I no longer have the link. :(

I follow it closely and there are people in the hospital in Indonesia right now with suspected bird flu, and one died last week. There are people in the hospital being observed with symptoms in India as they have a huge outbreak in poultry right now and are culling millions of chickens. This week outbreak in poultry in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Taiwan. Every country in the world is still beefing up their planning and surveillance.

In Indonesia if a person gets Tamiflu within two days the odds are they will survive. This rarely happens so their case fatality rate is very high.

It just hasn't hit the jackpot re spreading from person to person easily. May not ever do it or H5N1 may be the one go pandemic. Time will tell.

that during one of China's early outbreaks of bird flu there were reports coming out of Chinese soldiers cordoning off villages and towns, refusing entry or exit, your basic enforced quarantine. The WHO was quite upset because Chinese authorities refused to cooperate in describing either the intensity or spread of the virus.

It's interesting to hear what is currently happening with bird flu. That's great that
you are still following this story closely.

I used to follow it closely too, and I kept track of the number of cases worldwide. When I stopped
paying attention, I think 150 people had died from bird flu.

I was very scared by all of it.

As you said, the disease hasn't been successful at hopping from animal--->human... or human----->human. I would assume that the
longer this flu hangs around, that means more time to perfect its transmission potential.

Thanks again for the additional info.

I always appreciate your posts.

I find it very fascinating so am keeping up with it.
I forgot to mention that Egypt has five suspected cases hospitalized right now also.
Thank you for the kind words.

Nobody actually knew if Tamiflu worked well against it, and it turned out that against some strains of the bird flue it wasn't all that effective.

So as a palliative, it might work briefly, but nobody wanted to bet on it working much. Long term, the flue would outmaneuvre Tamiflu. Still, in the rush and premature panic they stockpiled a lot of it before stopping the stockpiling. By now it's all expired and been dumped, I'd expect.

I never got the shot but I decided then to look at government declared flu scares with a questioning eye.

(till bush stole the 2004 election, and all of a sudden the terror alerts mysteriously stopped).

It wasn't a "fake" scare. Overly dramatic? Yes. Media darling? Obviously.

Fake? Absolutely not.

The influenza virus has wallowed in a perfect environment since we first started "domesticating" foul and swine for human purposes. The flu is brought to us through wild bird migrations, the mutations they undergo in swine - and ourselves.

"Bird flu" is not exotic, it's the normal way of things in the last few thousand years. We can't know which way it will go.

those infamous, and worthless, Orange Alerts.

There's always something to "fear," and what should we do with information like this?

I know. Go wash your hands again.

"I opened the window and in flew enza."

This was an actual childen's nursery rhyme from 1918...:(

My grand-Uncle died just after returning from Europe in October 1918.

Although I can see the benefit of studying the 1918 virus, the fact that it was recreated and exists now is quite frightening...

from troops.

My grandmother died in 1918, having cared for the ill.

It was first observed there in March, 1918. It was spread world-wide by the massive troop movements of the AEF.

On edit: The mortality rates were astounding!

She told me about it, was out of school so the teacher brought her exams to her and she took them in front of the fireplace... She was in Normal School, studying to be a teacher... :-)

:silly::hi:

The "American Experience: 1918 Pandemic" documentary is where I got a lot of info about the "Spanish" Flu. Have you ever seen it?;)

You went there after high school, like college, but just for teachers. She must have been only 17. She told me that back then women's only choices were between becoming a teacher or a nurse. So it was an easy choice for her... :7

She first taught in a one-room school where a lot of the students were older than she was. She was the last one in her class to get a job, but she got the highest salary... $1000-a-year! :wow:

The school was right across the road from her grandmother's. I've seen it. Her grandmother wasn't well, had had a stroke, so Nana would look out the window and if she saw a white cloth waving from the grandmother's window, Nana knew that she needed help and would run home... BTW, she's the one in the marriage certificate... :-)

And, no, I don't believe you ever showed me that one, did you? :shrug:

;)

Actually, this thread has inspired me to watch in again - right now...

Refresh my memory... :-)

}(

:think: :evilgrin:

And so I probably already told you that story... x(

We're all descended from the survivors - people who were resistant to it.

Not that I'd take any chances.

the Influenza...I should know.

He contracted it while enroute home from Europe in 1918.:hi:

It actually got to be a joke how often he got ill. It wasn't so funny after 1921...

FDR: I don't feel so good...

...and found letters that Lucy Mercer had sent him while he was overseas. Sadly, busted...:(

... the isolating of huge groups of people thought to be infected and essentially just left, without medical treatment ...

I recall hearing a discussion on NPR a few years back about a particular city or part of a city here in Central IN that was almost literally turned into a type of Warsaw Ghetto where nobody was allowed in or out and those stuck in, unfortunately, were left to their own devices. Not sure if this was done in other parts of the country as well - presumably as a 'preventative quarantine'-type of measure, that had worse results than anticipated.

Must dig up that discussion and find out what city it was ... :shrug:

When you have an epidemic you can't cure...what else can you do? Did they do that with Yellow Fever, too? I remember a scene from the movie Jezebel that would indicate it.

an excellent book on the subject is Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 by Elizabeth Fenn.

http://www.amazon.com/Pox-Americana-Smallpox-Epidemic-1775-82/dp/080907821X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230607125&sr=1-1

soldiers & civilians alike.

a period children's rhyme

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

wasn't it something like 20,000,000 deaths, worldwide?

died from the 1918 flu. Soldiers came back from Europe contracting infection on the troop ships and trains and then to every small town in America.
Like Eham and the Plague, no place was safe...

Dr. Wilson held her hand through the night. Obviously she survived.

The Spanish-American war vets returned and would travel through Marquette, Michigan. The waitresses recounted to me that they watched for the good looking ones. My cousins.

The troops traveled back to the US via Hong Kong, where the requisite pigs, chickens and ducks mix in order to get a good flu virus mix.

Makes more sense to me than a European start.

as to the genesis of the 1918 pandemic. It now appears that there were concurrent outbreaks across the globe, not from one source.

In fact, the 1918 flu was so devastating that it has been cited as part of the reason for the end of WWI. If you want to read more about it, there's a very good book on the topic, "The Great Influenza" by John. M. Barry.

People woke up in the morning and were dead before sundown. It killed about 100 million people worldwide in a year. There's a reason this slipped from the memory of humankind for so long. Carnage on this level was just too damn frightening to remember.

And I, for one, am glad they're trying to figure out how it did what it did. There will be other pandemics -- and they'll travel easier and faster now with the vectoring of planes. The more we understand about this disease the better prepared we'll be for the next one. (Sadly, the next usually comes from where you least expect it, but I'll go with knowledge over fear of knowledge any day of the week.)

Barry is really about his subjects, writes a lot of social history detail.
I just finished the Great Influenza, found it enlightening and absorbing.

Our nazi doctors at Fort Detrick are probably working on it right now.

the decision to retain the smallpox virus by weapons labs after the disease had been eradicated is disturbing, to say the least.

THings that deadlt have to be studied and figured out. This virus was studied and it looks like it was figured out.

They reconstructed this virus from vicrims buried in permafrost. They could do the same thing with smallpox if they wanted to weaponize it. But if it is studied, the DNA verfied, and cures found and the results published...then all of humanity will not die.

as I recall, the influenza virus was dug from an Inuit burial ground.

she was sent home from school and died that evening. Rest of the family were fine.

I am so sorry.

The scary part, to me (tin-foil hat on now), is that there are people in places of power who believe (probably correctly) that the only way to save the planet for humanity is for a huge and rapid population decrease. Pandemic would be a way to accomplish this. I remember reading up on some of these people and their ideas, scary stuff, but they were too connected to just dismiss as nutcases.

"bloody flux" because that is what people did right before they died and it generally killed in as little as three days. She remembers wrapping the dead in shrouds because they couldn't bury fast enough. This was in the U.S.

She died herself at 102 in 83.

My father, his brother and sister were orphaned by it.
Their mother was 28 or 29 years old. This was in NE Ohio in 1918.

2 useful sites to keep track of bird-flu...

www.legitgov.org/flu_oddities.html

www.recombinomics.com/whats_new.html

Mac L'Lyr

on next week. :( He loves to talk epidemiology...