Spanish Flu’s Murderous Variants

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The Spanish flu brutally devastated the world after World War I. Death came in waves and the most devastating was the second wave that culminated in 1918. Genetic archaeologists found that in 1918 new variants of the famous flu virus seem to have been born.


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Image by Elliot Alderson from Pixabay

Comparing pandemics of different pathogens is obviously difficult. Yet, the history of pandemics is a valuable source of knowledge. The most important for us the Spanish flu that shocked the world a hundred years ago. Though, it is unfair to call it the Spanish flu as Spain just was one of the few countries at the time that didn’t censor the numbers of dead because of its neutrality making it look overly-afflicted.

One of the things that are obvious about the Spanish flu is the fact that the destruction came and went in distinctly separated waves. And it seems the first wave was much less of a killer compared to the waves that came later. The question is – why?

Now, Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer from the Robert Koch-Institut in Berlin and his colleagues want to provide an answer. In their research, they went for viruses. And while the Spanish flu happened a hundred years ago luckily, there are still source that we can get these viruses from. Calvignac-Spencer’s team used samples of lungs coming from six people who died in 1918 and 1919. These are kept safely in formalin in pathological collections in Germany and Austria. There of the lungs – one coming from a young lady from Munich and two from soldiers from Berlin – had the virus of the Spanish flu A/H1N1. The two soldiers died during the first wave while the young woman died a year later.

The researchers took out the RNA of the pandemic virus and reconstructed a substantial part of the genome. This may sound simple to some but this was totally impossible until very recently. And it is a great success. The viruses that came from the soldiers had 60 and 90 % of their genomes reconstructed. As the two soldiers died on the same very day it will not surprise you that the viruses were practically identical. But the genome of the virus that came from the lady from Munich differed and had several noticeable mutations. And the genomes of the viruses that were extracted from their victims in Alaska and New York were even more different.

Calvignac-Spencer and his team analyzed these genomes. The synthesized parts of the virus and experimentally checked how these variants infected human cells and multiplied in them. The scientists came to the conclusion that the constantly mutating pandemic virus bread into several different variants during 1918 that became much more deadlier.

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3 comments
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I am certain the same thing is applicable to COVID19. The continuous mutation makes them deadlier than before. Research on vaccines must try to catch up or even move ahead of the mutation.

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Some internet sleuths were warning back in January 2020 that we could see 'waves' of covid19 similar to the Spanish flu (which some believe was actually introduced to the West by Chinese workers ). When you start thinking about viruses in terms of 'networks' then you can see how this was entirely possible, particularly in a world as interconnected as ours. We should have paid more attention to those prophets of doom.

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