“Ever since the great flu pandemic of 1918 it has been a mystery where that virus came from and why it was so severe,” says Professor Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona. Between 50 and 100 million people died from the outbreak dubbed “the Spanish flu”, several times more than World War I, yet history books generally relegate it to a footnote.
While most of those who die from normal flu outbreaks are the very young or the elderly the 1918 outbreak was different – the heaviest death toll was among young adults, including those that had been in good health beforehand...
However, Worobey also turns the idea on its head by proposing exposure to a very different version of the flu virus primed the immune system to misread epidemic version. The finger of suspicion is pointed at an H3N8 virus common between 1889 and 1900. Tens of millions of people would have been exposed to this virus in childhood and recovered, but Worobey said, “A person with an antibody arsenal directed against the H3 protein would not have fared well when faced with flu viruses studded with H1 protein. And we believe that that mismatch may have resulted in the heightened mortality in the age group that happened to be in their late 20s during the 1918 pandemic."
0 comments:
Post a Comment