Actually, there are people alive now who were born before 1918. Please tell me you realized that.
So shouldn't it's effect be attenuated this time if the new H5N1 flu is mutating to be similar to the 1918 flu?
Acquired characteristics (other than genetic mutations) are not inherited.
People still alive no longer have any antibodies to the 1918 flu.
Should have said 'almost everyone.' So shouldn't it's effect be attenuated this time if the new H5N1 flu is mutating to be similar to the 1918 flu? Acquired characteristics (other than genetic mutations) are not inherited. People still alive no longer have any antibodies to the 1918 flu.
I understand that Lamarck was wrong (mostly). But I assume that pretty much everyone on earth was exposed to the 1918 flu. Some died and some lived. There was surely some genetic factor in whether you lived or died.
I have read that the bubonic plague is less virulent in people who are, for the most part, descendants of people who survived the plague that was the plague when it first hit.
My grandmother's older sister died of the flu epidemic in 1920, not long after an older brother returned home from France as a WW1 soldier. The sister had a twin brother who also had the flu but he didn't die. I've often wondered if the older brother brought the disease back with him.