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Searching for Lethal Influenza Strains
1gor writes "Scientists want to exhume the body of the victim of the world's most lethal influenza pandemic between 1918 and 1919 to examine the structure of the virus, reports Bloomberg.com. In an airtight coffin they expect to find well-preserved virus known for its unique ability to kill healthy young people. The strain's attack and mortality rates were highest among people aged between 20 years and 50 years. Are you scared already?"
The guys that are working this must crap their pants every time they sneeze.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Body of 'a' victim I expect. It killed more people than the world war.
Living in my parents basement, never leaving the house, having no human contact, there is no way that I'll ever get the flu. The germ that destroys humanity may already be breeding in my filth, but I've learned to live with it.
Influenza is a virus. Antibiotics only work against bacteria. Of course, many people with viral infections go to their doctors, and the doctors want to make the patients happy, so the perscribe antibiotics. Sometimes this makes sense, as a viral infection may weaken the immune system to allow a secondary bacterial infection. (I got pneumonia after a nasty flu.)
Scientists scare me sometimes though.
"looky here let's open up this box where a deadly virus might be trapped floating about and study it"! We'll just hope it doesn't get out.
Reminds me of,
"I'm not real sure if this atmoic detonation will rip the atmosphere off the earth in a chain reaction, well here goes....*boom*".
When you say it like that it almost sounds like a farside cartoon, but it's pretty close to what happened.
I think if anything scared me, it is the fact that scientists will do anything to figure things out regardless of how potentially dangerous it is.
The mentality of, "if it can be calculated then it should be" really pisses me off.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Reminds me of this readable account of Australian research into more effective mousepox strains.
Imagine an air-borne influenza with the same kind of engineered ability to agitate and misdirect the human immune system response. It would make the 1918 influenza look tame by comparison.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This states that there's already a sample out there that is currently being sequenced... Though the evidence off the page above is 404...
This is the fearful graph you're looking for.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
are they trying to figure out how to kill healthy young people? can someone explain how this will help our understanding of medicine?
Perhaps they're trying to figure out how it killed 20 million healthy young people, so they can prevent it from ever happening again?
Clearly the reason we study things like this is because we fear them.
We want to prevent another outbreak. We want to study why it was so lethal, so we can cure it and similar epidemics.
We also fear that someone else will resurrect this bug and spread it around.
But those who fear that the U.S. is studying it in order to make biological weapons will also figure out that a biological weapon like this will not be useful without the ability to innocculate your own population against it.
When large democracies study diseases, even with the worst motives, it scares me less than if we found that suicidal cults or fanatics were studying them. Even if the government is studying it for all the wrong reasons, we end up better able to defend against it.
There will be more pandemics. They may be man-made, but more likely they will be natural.
And the only way we will be prepared for them is to study them.
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
While it is true that common antibiotics do not work on viruses, it is not true that all antibiotics only work on bacteria. There do exist some viral antibiotics (even for colds), but they are not the ones perscribed at your family doctor, and most of them are a recent development, and not very effective. (also some antibiotics work on fungi)
. htm i .shtml p anishflu.htm
searching the following documents for "viral antibiotic" or simply "antibiotic" should give you the relevant information:
http://www.happybody.com/happybodycom/articlecold
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/onelife/health/sex/st
http://www.explorers.org/newsfiles/archivefiles/s
Intrestingly enough, this last link is even related to the 1918 flu epidemic. It is about a project to exhume people who died of the spanish flu to study the virus, so apparently this is not the first time it has happened.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Did you look at that US map of how long it took to spread?
Week 1: it's in only places that have international contact (NYC mainly).
Week 2: all major cities and surrounding regions have it.
Week 3: all minor cities have it (since people have travelled to/from major centres).
Week 4: everywhere has it!
Exponential growth reminiscent of the super flu from Stephen King's The Stand! I'm sure Washington State wouldn't be a week 3 infection this time around, either. Heck, with travel being more popular here, I doubt it'd take 2 weeks for the polination of pretty much everyone with a killer virus that is airborne to take its toll.
Of course, you have to wonder how long it would last. Would it be safe for people to destroy all the bodies in an incinerator? What about all the technology that we have now that'd fail in catastrophic ways with no one to monitor it? This is some seriously scary stuff.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
in The Stand the communicability was more like 99.4% (pg. 30).
that would leave about 1.5 million people in the US (assuming our population is 280 mil). seemed like there were fewer in the book/movie, but that is a technicality.
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
Yes, they dug up his corpse in hopes of finding a vaccine for inane humor. Let that be a lesson to us all.
The strain's attack and mortality rates were highest among people aged between 20 years and 50 years. Are you scared already?"
Homer: Eh, not the end of the world.
Marge: No, it's the Apocalypse! Bart, are you wearing clean underwear?
Bart: Not any more.
Seriously though, if you want an article that will make you soil yourself silly, read the Demon in the Freezer. It's a long read, but definitely worthwhile. And scary as hell...
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
The strain's attack and mortality rates were highest among people aged between 20 years and 50 years. Are you scared already?
Actually no, I'm 51.
----- rL
Or perhaps they're trying to wipe us out and live forever off our stem cells?
When the 1918 flu first broke out, it occurred during what was quite possibily the worst possible conditions for a it to occur. WWI was on, so large numbers of young people were being shipped all over the globe. At the same time, in many counteries the press was hobbled by wartime censorship, thus delaying the medical community's recognition of the pandemic's existence. The nickname of that the Flu was given, "The Spanish Lady" actually came about from Spain's status as a neutral nation during this time -- the press was able to speak freely, and so its existance was revealed there first.
The 1918 flu virus had a couple of interesting features. As the Bloomberg article mentions, it has an unusual ability to kill young adults. Basically, your typical influenza virus (and many diseases in general) have a U-shaped mortality curve -- highest among children and the elderly. However, this particular outbreak had a W-shaped curve, with a sudden spike right in the middle.
The reason for this mortality spike has long been a matter for conjecture. One feature of this particular flu outbreak was that it often killed suddenly, sometimes without warning, with victims also frequently showing presence of hemorrhage and edema in the lungs. This was so unusual that some have wondered if it was influenza at all -- after all, back then a virus was a mysterious "filterable agent", invisible to the most powerful optical microscopes. However, we do know from more modern research that a particularly large proportions of people who lived through that period have antibodies against a particular influenza type.
A theory is that the high lethality was not due just to the virus itself, but to an immune over-reaction (which would be strongest in young adults) which damaged the lungs. Other theories have suggested that perhaps the influenza outbreak was actually a co-epidemic, with some other agent also present -- another virus, a bacterium, even lungworms have been proposed. While it is likely that weakened victims often picked up secondary infections, evidence for an actual binary epidemic is weak.
Could the epidemic occur again if the strain were resurrected, or perhaps spontaneously put back together by the mutational drifts and re-arrangements that Influenza constantly is undergoing? Indeed, one of the questions is why hasn't it survived into the present? Some have suggested that perhaps the impact was large enough that humanity has been selected for greater resistance. Or perhaps features of the disease have since been incorporated into the various strains which still smolder today, producing a herd resistance which would be enough to prevent a major pandemic. Or maybe we've just been lucky, and it went extinct all by itself.
Either way, I think that even if it suddenly popped up, with all it's virulence intact, we're in much better shape today. We have a network that tracks the ebb and flow of flu epidemics every year, we have a spread of well-characterized vaccines (plus a new nasal spray vaccine coming soon), plus four different FDA-approved anti-virals for influenza. Even if it turned out to be something radically different -- and the historical antibody profiles previously mentioned suggest it's not.