A possible European origin of the Spanish influenza and the first attempts to reduce mortality to combat superinfecting bacteria: an opinion from a virologist and a military historian

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Hum Vaccin Immunother. 2019 May 23:1-4. doi: 10.1080/21645515.2019.1607711. [Epub ahead of print]
A possible European origin of the Spanish influenza and the first attempts to reduce mortality to combat superinfecting bacteria: an opinion from a virologist and a military historian.

Oxford JS¹, Gill D¹.
Author information

Abstract

When we reconsider the virology and history of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic, the science of 2018 provides us with tools which did not exist at the time. Two such tools come to mind. The first lies in the field of 'gain of function' experiments. A potential pandemic virus, such as influenza A (H5N1), can be deliberately mutated in the laboratory in order to change its virulence and spreadability. Key mutations can then be identified. A second tool lies in phylogenetics, combined with molecular clock analysis. It shows that the 1918 pandemic virus first emerged in the years 1915-1916. We have revisited the literature published in Europe and the United States, and the notes left by physicians who lived at the time. In this, we have followed the words of the late Alfred Crosby: who wrote that "contemporary documentary evidence from qualified physicians" is the key to understanding where and how the first outbreaks occurred. In our view, the scientists working in Europe fulfill Crosby's requirement for contemporary evidence of origin. Elsewhere, Crosby also suggested that "the physicians of 1918 were participants in the greatest failure of medical science in the twentieth century". Ours is a different approach. We point to individual pathologists in the United States and in France, who strove to construct the first universal vaccines against influenza. Their efforts were not misdirected, because the ultimate cause of death in nearly all cases flowed from superinfections with respiratory bacteria.


KEYWORDS:

Etaples Administrative District; Hospital Beds in the Great War; Hygiene in the Great War; Influenza Epidemics in 1917; New Vaccines; Spanish Influenza Origin

PMID: 31121112 DOI: 10.1080/21645515.2019.1607711

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Spanish flu may have lingered two years before 1918 outbreak and vaccine could have treated it

The most severe pandemic in recent history, killing some 50 million people worldwide, the Spanish influenza, may have emerged up to two years earlier than previously believed. And, according to a new and influential study, its early manifestation was ignored at the time as a "minor infection".

It is believed that, if doctors had recognized that influenza was the cause of an illness which was killing soldiers in Etaples, France, and Aldershot, England, in 1916, scientists would then have had better grounds to embark on a two-year vaccination programme and some of the worst effects of the Spanish influenza could have been avoided. Such are the findings of a new paper, launched by Professor John S. Oxford, the UK's top expert on influenza, and Douglas Gill, a military historian.

Published in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, the study uses modern day scientific technology and delves through literature published in The Lancet from the time, to not only track the origins of the virus, but to seek how we can use this information to learn from the past to prevent the spread of an influenza pandemic...