Disease: Influenza

The first written records of the flu symptoms come from 400 B.C.E. by Hippocrates.  He noted the watery nose, fever, body aches, coughing/sneezing, fatigue and headaches.  The genius of the flu, which is why it's a prime example of how diseases are just finely tuned DNA-engineered machines, is that the very symptoms spread the disease.  It's transferred through body fluids, so the flu boosts up those body fluids.  Flood the eyes.  Make the nose runny.  Even more importantly, since it can be passed on via air, make the host sneeze and cough!  Shoot seeds of infection out there.  It's absolutely brilliant.  Every sick person becomes a broadcast system, spreading the germs like a sprinkler.

I'm gonna pause there and sit on how sassy that is.

That virus can mutate like a champ, too.  What Hippocrates didn't know is that there are five main strands of influenza, each with thousands of variants.  In fact, there are new strands of the flu every year that appear in the two global "flu seasons."  (There is one season for northern hemisphere and one for the southern.)  Usually, you build up antibodies for a disease when you get it, which is why you tend to get the mumps and chick pox once in your life, but you rarely see the same flu virus twice.  That is why you can get it every year.  It's prolific.

Now, of course, we have gotten more adept at treating influenza.  In the 1940's, for example, 10 out of every 100,000 U.S. citizens died of influenza annually.  That number dropped to about 0.5 in 100,000 in the 1990's.  But influenza still remains a serious threat to mankind, because while it will hums along killing less than 1 in every 100,000, when there are outbreaks, they are severe.

Historically, there have been twenty known influenza epidemics.  The actual number is impossible to know because influenza symptoms are similar to so many other diseases.  The first one clearly linked to the flu was in 1493.  In 1580, a pandemic (larger than an epidemic) spread from Asia to Europe through Africa; Rome lost 8,000 people (out of about 90,000 residents) and some Spanish towns were almost wiped out.  Pandemics continued to flare up, and as cities became more crowded (facilitating ease of transfer), the number of deaths climbed.  In 1889, for example, an outbreak killed 1 million people in Russia.  Asia again saw two other pandemics that took up to 2.5 million combined, in 1957 and 1968.  None of that, though, touches the Spanish Flu after World War I.

The world was battered from the global conflict, and out of nowhere came a strand of Influenza that knocked mankind sideways.  It is estimated to have been contracted by 20% of the world's population, killing over 2% of the world.  Fatalities originally were estimated to be from 25-50 million, but more recent adjustments have soared to 50-100 million deaths.  That is just insane.  It was first documented in Fort Riley, Kansas in March 1918, popping up in Queens (NYC) a week later.  August that year, an even more dangerous strand appeared in France and Boston.  It managed to travel the world like wildfire, killing young healthy adults and skipping over the young and elderly.  That isn't normal. 

This particular strand was so deadly because of something called a cytokine storm.  Jigga-WHA?  When the body fights off a disease or infection, it sends white blood cells to the damaged area, but what happened with the 1918 Spanish Flu was the body lost its ability to limit the white blood cells it dispatched.  Those white blood cells then start eating away at the body.  So, the healthier the immune system, the harder the Spanish Flu would hit.  Younger and older people just didn't have the ability to produce enough white blood cells to do themselves damage (which is why they are usually more vulnerable to getting sick), while healthy adults were severely affected.

Amazing.

So, if another one of those influenza cytokine storms comes along, it could be a terrible disaster.  And one is due, but where would it come from?  Well, it could evolve from any strand out there now with the slightest mutation.  The thing is that we are talking about more than just human strands of the disease, too.

Influenza is found in other animals, including dogs, horses and pigs.  But birds?  They are the flu reservoirs.  They actually have all strands of influenza, and their versions can make it over to humans.  That's why there is so much concern over outbreaks of the bird flu virus over the past few years.  It's a simple mutation and that flu virus can jump from bird to human (as it has been doing recently), then another mutation to jump from human to human.  Then we're in trouble again, because who knows how that new flu will beat up our bodies and react to our current supply of drug treatments?  Who knows?  Something tells me we'll find out soon enough.

This influeza is some HAWTaction [hot ak-shuhn].