An avian outbreak associated with panzootic equine influenza in 1872: an early example of highly pathogenic avian influenza?

[mixin]

An avian outbreak associated with panzootic equine influenza in 1872: an early example of highly pathogenic avian influenza?
David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger

Background
An explosive fatal epizootic in poultry, prairie chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese, occurred over much of the populated United States between 15 November and 15 December 1872. To our knowledge the scientific literature contains no mention of the nationwide 1872 poultry outbreak.

Objective
To understand avian influenza in a historical context.

Results
The epizootic progressed in temporal-geographic association with a well-reported panzootic of equine influenza that had begun in Canada during the last few days of September 1872. The 1872 avian epizootic was universally attributed at the time to equine influenza, a disease then of unknown etiology but widely believed to be caused by the same transmissible respiratory agent that caused human influenza.

Conclusions
Another microbial agent could have caused the avian outbreak; however, its strong temporal and geographic association with the equine panzootic, and its clinical and epidemiologic features, are most consistent with highly pathogenic avian influenza. The avian epizootic could thus have been an early instance of highly pathogenic avian
influenza.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1750-2659.2010.00181.x/pdf

 

[mixin]

Re: An avian outbreak associated with panzootic equine influenza in 1872: an early example of highly pathogenic avian influenza?

Some snips of interest from the paper:

we searched two web-based newspaper archival sources http://www.Newspaperarchives.com and
http://www.Proquest.com

Horses, mules, and menagerie/circus zebras were involved, with 'spill over' infections into dogs and cats. Numerous individual human cases and localized outbreaks throughout the United States, often associated with exposures to ill horses, were reported.

Local observers repeatedly linked avian disease to antecedent equine disease and independently noted outbreaks in poultry immediately after being allowed to peck in stables that held ill or recently ill horses.

Outbreaks of an allegedly novel fatal swine disease were also widely reported and often attributed to pigs rooting in stables after equine illnesses (could be coincidental).

Reports of morbidity and moderate mortality in wild deer around the country were also attributed by observers to equine influenza on the basis of clinical signs and development of illness after contact with ill work horses in the forests

If the 1872 epizootic was truly caused by an avian HPAI virus that was coadapted to horses, the unprecedented epizootiologic features remain to be explained.

Spread speculation:
1. equine panzootic could have begun in Ontario with avian to equine viral transmission and have been subsequently amplified and spread by the large and mobile horse population. In this scenario, equine disease caused by a newly equine-adapted but still avian-like HPAI virus was carried by ill horses and then 'back-transmitted' into local poultry farms everywhere horses were shipped, horses thereby serving as intermediate hosts for avian transmission.

2. the avian epizootic might have been spread entirely by the movement of poultry. This appears consistent with the rapidity of recognition of the outbreaks, identified west of the Mississippi River within a week of initial reports in upper New York, a travel time that seems possible only by railroad, and with most recognized outbreaks occurring in the vicinity (100 or so miles) of rail lines. However, we have little information about the extent of large-scale poultry rail shipment in that era, which in any case went generally from West to East in the opposite direction of equine and avian epizootic spread.

 

[sharon sanders]

Re: An avian outbreak associated with panzootic equine influenza in 1872: an early example of highly pathogenic avian influenza?

Morens and Taubenberger: A New Look At The Panzootic Of 1872





# 4995


One of the most fascinating events in relatively modern infectious disease history occurred in the fall of 1872, when a massive wave of (presumably) equine influenza swept across North American, infecting much of the horse population from Canada to Mexico ? and killing up to 10%.

You?ll find an excellent history of this outbreak from Horsetalk.co.nz.

How equine flu brought the US to a standstill

A Boston fire wagon without its horses.
September 26, 2007

Australia's equine flu outbreak may have crippled the racing industry, but an 1872 outbreak in North America brought the entire US economy to a virtual standstill.
(Continue . . .)
​

This was at a time in history when horses were the primary means of transportation, and the economic effects of this months long epizootic were substantial, and some have suggested it contributed to theeconomic Panic of 1873 the following year.


Ian York author of the Mystery Rays blog wrote about this incident back in December of 2009 in a blog called Influenza before 1918, part II: 1872. A brief excerpt:

Without horses, business slammed to a halt; the mail didn?t run, groceries didn?t reach the cities, crops weren?t harvested or transported. After a few weeks, most of the horses recovered and business followed, but the epizootic swept across the country (intensely tracked by the newspapers of the day, warning each city in turn that it was going to be attacked), finally fizzling out the following summer in British Columbia.
​

Little remembered today, this was a huge story in 1972. The assumption has been that this was sparked by some drift or shift in an already existing equine influenza.


But David Morens and Jeffrey K. Taubenberger of the NIH bring us tantalizing details of a concurrent outbreak of poultry deaths across the country, and that raises some interesting questions.

Without the ability to analyze and identify pathogens from that era, researchers are understandably hampered in their understanding of what exactly what transpired 140 years ago.

But Taubenberger and Morens discuss a plausible scenario where a highly pathogenic avian virus may have jumped species and infected horses, pigs, deer, and in some cases, even humans.
​

My thanks to mixin on FluTrackers for posting this link.

Morens and Taubenberger (2010) An avian outbreak associated with panzootic equine influenza in 1872: an early example of highly pathogenic avian influenza? Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses 4(6), 373?377.
Abstract

Background An explosive fatal epizootic in poultry, prairie chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese, occurred over much of the populated United States between 15 November and 15 December 1872. To our knowledge the scientific literature contains no mention of the nationwide 1872 poultry outbreak.
Objective To understand avian influenza in a historical context.
Results The epizootic progressed in temporal-geographic association with a well-reported panzootic of equine influenza that had begun in Canada during the last few days of September 1872. The 1872 avian epizootic was universally attributed at the time to equine influenza, a disease then of unknown etiology but widely believed to be caused by the same transmissible respiratory agent that caused human influenza.
Conclusions Another microbial agent could have caused the avian outbreak; however, its strong temporal and geographic association with the equine panzootic, and its clinical and epidemiologic features, are most consistent with highly pathogenic avian influenza. The avian epizootic could thus have been an early instance of highly pathogenic avian influenza.
​

Jeffrey K. Taubenberger and David Morens are, of course, familiar names to followers of influenza and virology.

Both are researchers at NIAID. Taubenberger, quite famously, was the first to sequence the the genome of the 1918 Spanish Flu virus while David Morens is a prominent medical historian and professor.
​

Both are extensively published, and have collaborated often in the past.

As this report is too good to try to summarize, I?ll simply suggest you follow this link and read it in its entirety.

 

[gsgs]

Re: An avian outbreak associated with panzootic equine influenza in 1872: an early example of highly pathogenic avian influenza?

why was it mild in humans but deadly in horses ?
do humans get equine H3N8 nowadays ?

maybe humans had antibodies, so it was a mammalean virus
that went from humans to horses

obviously it didn't spread by wild birds
and apparantly poultry got it from horses
and not from other poultry (?)

the 1956 H7N7 is too old, it probably existed
in mammals long before 1872 in all 8 segments, IMO.


as such outbreaks often happened by reassortment,
it could have been just a new segment (HA?)
acquired by the horses


did the virus disappear ? Or do some segments still live in
todays equine/canine H3N8 ? I'm not sure....
-----------edit-----------
ahh, no. H3N8 apparantly went from birds to horses in 1963
http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=34185
http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showpost.php?p=283479

------------------------------
http://www.lrgaf.org/medical/report.htm
http://www.lrgaf.org/medical/Report of Commissioner of Agriculture 1872-abridged.pdf
http://www.lrgaf.org/medical/Report of Commissioner of Agriculture 1872.pdf

how is it transmitted ?
presumably by horses coughing

did some horses get it twice ? I couldn't find it.

apparantly not many, so immunity did set in and protected them in the
following years. But why didn't it spread to Europe and Asia or Mexico ?
So the horses had no immunity in 1872 despite horse-flu being common
in previous years. That sounds like reassortment, getting a new HA.
Or an entirely new virus coming from birds, extinct now.

----------------------------

with this high infectivity also maybe humans did transmit it asymptomatically to horses.
Some will have left their horses in te stable to protect them but apparantly
that did not work
or transmitted by birds or flies eating horseapples

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was transmitted to resident horses having no known contact with imported horses.

Six-mile quarantines were immediately instituted around the original infection site, and were subsequently instituted around each new site. Horse racing and harness racing were banned and a “national standstill” was proclaimed involving all movement of horses. Horses were banned from all agricultural shows. Zoos even took horses and donkeys off display, banned human contact with zebras and cancelled the rhinoceros tour! In spite of all that, some 7,000 premises were affected,

“These epidemics occurred despite imported animals being subjected to officially approved quarantine

failure of the quarantine facility in Sydney to contain the outbreak among imported stallions

equine influenza spread from England to China way back in 1800. There were certainly no airplanes whisking horses from empire to empire at that time, nor even any ships moving fast enough to get them that far during the incubation period of a disease

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