Posted on 08/21/2008 11:52:47 PM PDT by neverdem
Ninety years later, survivors of the worst epidemic in history still retain knowledge of the event--on a cellular level. Scientists have found that the immune systems of a group of 90- and 100-year-olds continue to produce antibodies to the virus responsible for the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed as many as 40 million people. What's more, the antibodies still work: When transferred to mice, the rodents became resistant to deadly flu infections.
It doesn't take a global pandemic to rile up the immune system. Even the seasonal flu prompts immune cells called B cells to generate antibodies specific to the offending virus. A handful of studies in the past few years showed that most people born before 1918 were still immune to the 1918 flu. But those analyses did not examine this immunity on a molecular level, by dissecting the antibodies, nor did they test how powerful they really were.
Hoping to shed some light on the issue, viral immunologist James Crowe Jr. of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and colleagues searched for survivors of the 1918 flu. They found 32 people, ages 91 to 101, who had lived through the pandemic as children, most of whom remembered a family member being struck by the disease. Blood tests confirmed what earlier studies had found: the presence of antibodies against the 1918 flu virus in each subject. A closer look at eight of the volunteers showed that the B cells of seven were still producing these antibodies. That suggests a powerful, long-lasting immune response, says Crowe. When purified in the lab, the antibodies bound to the 1918 virus or others genetically similar to it.
Nearly a century later, those antibodies still had fight in them. When the team infected mice with a genetically reconstructed 1918 flu virus (Science, 7 October 2005), those inoculated with antibodies from the elderly survivors survived, whereas animals given a different antibody did not, the group reports online this week in Nature.
"The fact that 90 years after the pandemic, B cells are still floating around in the blood of these people just changes our notion of immunologic memory," says Crowe, who did not expect the study to work. "We thought it would be impossible to get antibodies to the 1918 influenza."
But not everyone is surprised. "Immunity is long-lived," and many childhood vaccines last a lifetime, says Jeffery Taubenberger, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, who sequenced the 1918 strain. Still, creating a cell line in the lab from these antibodies that can be used as treatment would be a valuable tactic against infectious diseases like the flu, he says.
micro ping
ping
"The 1918 flu pandemic (commonly referred to as the Spanish flu) was an influenza pandemic that was first found in the United States, appeared in Sierra Leone and France, and then spread to nearly every part of the world. It was caused by an unusually severe and deadly Influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1. Many of its victims were healthy young adults, in contrast to most influenza outbreaks which predominantly affect juvenile, elderly, or otherwise weakened patients. The Spanish flu lasted from March 1918 to June 1920,[1] spreading even to the Arctic and remote Pacific islands. It is estimated that anywhere from 20 to 100 million people were killed worldwide, or the approximate equivalent of one third of the population of Europe,[2][3][4] more than double the number killed in World War I.[5]....."
"..that the virus kills via a cytokine storm, which explains its unusually severe nature and the unusual age profile of its victims (the virus caused an overreaction of the body's immune system—the strong immune systems of young adults ravaged the body, while the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults caused less morbidity and mortality)..."
This Flu killed the big strong Farm boys and other young people faster than children and may have killed more people worldwide than the Black Death of the middle ages.
Thanks, SJ.
Pinging ye.
It actually came out of Kansas. There was a localized outbreak in 1917, and when the Army mobilized and young men from Kansas and thereabouts entered cantonments with tent cities, the influenza found the perfect breeding grounds. It ruptured forth on transport ships going over to France.
Some transport ships lost nearly half the men on board just on the trip over to Europe. Once ships got there and dispersed troops across northern France, the influenza spread. After demobilization soldiers returning home further spread it thoughout the world, from port to port to inland cities and farms.
My grandfather was a doctor in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. People would use flags to give the status of their family.
Great story.
My Mother, born 1917, lost a sister and a brother to the ‘18 epidemic. I have never known her to have ever had the flu during my lifetime. On the other hand, I usually get it every other or third year.
My mother is a 1917 baby too. I’ll have to ask her if she has any recollections as a child about people’s reactions to this. Her dad was a pastor and may have had to deal with a lot of grieving families. I too don’t ever remember her being sick with the flu. I wonder if she also remembers if my dad was ever sick with the flu. He would have been 12 at the time of the pandemic.
Importantly, there may be a way to radically reduce the cytokine storm effect in healthy young adults with strong immune systems, if we act soon.
That is, the reason the Spanish flu (H1N1) was so incredibly deadly, and Avian flu (H5N1) has the potential to be an order of magnitude deadlier than even the Spanish flu, is because the Hemagglutinin (the ‘H’ factor) was and is completely novel to the human immune system.
The Spanish flu, when it was new, created the cytokine storm effect that was very deadly to people with strong immune systems. Their own immune systems were possibly deadlier than the flu itself. The same with Avian flu today.
However, *since* the time of the Spanish flu, repeated exposures to H1 derivatives are much less deadly, for a simple reason: our immune systems are *used* to H1, so do not overreact when exposed to it, but just responds with a normal response to an infection.
So the solution to radically reduce the number of fatalities from H5N1 should be relatively straightforward: to massively immunize the people most as risk with a “harmless” version of ‘H5’ Hemagglutinin.
It does not have to be an entire virus, just that part of the virus, to teach their immune system to *not* “freak out” and kill them with a cytokine storm.
Importantly, it has to be determined *first* if this is a reasonable thing to do, or utterly insane. Because once in the human body, other influenza viruses might “adopt” this H5 Hemagglutinin. By doing so, we might actually *create* the pandemic disease.
But the clock is ticking. We have to know this, either way, *now*
Not so random. The chief epidemiologist of Vietnam discovered something a while back that set nerves on edge.
He found a herd of pigs, each animal of which had about five different strains of avian influenza, in a natural selection struggle for dominance. The winner of each pig’s “elimination round”, then contended with other “semi-finalists” of other pigs, until a “grand champion” strain came about, that infected the whole herd.
He speculated that this process in domestic and wild herds and flocks, essentially created the equivalent of an immense virtual computer, that would methodically create the most effective influenza strain.
Ironically, the animals that were part of this “virtual computer” would benefit by exposure to less lethal strains of the disease, giving them some degree of partial immunity to the “ultimate champion” strain.
But animals capable of being infected, but not part of the “virtual computer”, would be devastated by the “ultimate champion” strain, as their immune system would have had no exposure to it at all, so would dangerously overreact (read “cytokine storm”).
This is the front end of a pandemic, how an ultra-lethal new disease enters an animal population. The back end is just as important.
When a disease is new, it is terribly lethal, but it goes through a degeneration cycle, where less lethal strains win out, because their hosts survive to spread the disease.
Syphilis, for example, used to be horrifying and murderous in its effects (which is why Dr. Ehrlich, who invented the first effective treatment for it, is still regarded as one of the icons of science.) But today, syphilis is little more just an annoyance.
HIV-AIDS is another example. Initially, it was quickly lethal, but in a very fast degeneration curve, at least in the US, it is become a chronic instead of an acute disease.
This being said, it is strongly to our advantage, and could save millions of lives, if we can carefully introduce a safe H5 variant into our population, just enough to cause a mild immune response. But hopefully so defective that it will present to opportunity for influenza adaptation.
Once you turn a virus loose in a population, you pretty much lose control of how it will propagate. If you guess wrong, it will be a disaster. West Nile spread rapidly from the east coast across the U.S. Idaho loses about 1 horse per day during mosquito season. I think we have been losing about 5 humans per season.
Consider yourself *highly* commended, by someone who admittedly has *no* idea what they're talking about.
Cheers!
I’m motivated. Back when I was a youngster, I talked with an old gent who had been about my age when the Spanish flu hit.
He spent about a year and a half living indoors, his parents having died when he was very young, and raised by his older sisters who were frightened half to death of the influenza. They did piecemeal work at home, and seldom left the house, trying to avoid people as much as possible.
He lived in a second story room, and the house was located near the trail to the cemetery, so he would watch the horse drawn cart take the endless coffins up there. After a while, only the undertaker and the minister would go with the cart. And whenever a child’s casket would go by, he would have nightmares guessing which one of his friends was in it.
Anyone of means who had a house had a sick room, where the sick member of the family would live during any number of summer epidemics.
While medical sanitation was pretty good, mostly using carbolic acid and alcohol, the typical person was very ignorant of hygiene, the status quo until WWII, when compulsory health education was introduced into the schools.
I later learned that in Indiana of the time, a rumor was started that wearing a sweater knitted by a particular woman was proof against the flu. So for a brief time, she made a small fortune from desperate people who wanted her sweaters.
Importantly, in retrospect he noted the psychology of the epidemic. He remembered how government and the doctors were always two steps behind the disease, which he later figured out was because of the incubation period. So there was a great deal of “closing the barn door after the horses had escaped.”
Towns would be quarantined many days after the disease had hit and was waning, and many was the time when the healthy people were quarantined, but the sick people were not. Open hostility to strangers was still very rare, as the desire for news trumped fear, and people were very glad to see anyone who wasn’t obviously sick.
He said that the epidemic came in waves, two or three, sometimes separated by a month or more. And when the Spanish flu finally ended, talking about it in any way was a serious faux pas.
The dead became non-persons, not out of disrespect, but out of pain, which everyone had suffered horribly. Not even the rudest person would dare to mention the Spanish flu, and many people developed lifelong mental barriers to remembering it, such was the trauma. Many people discontinued the practice of writing births and deaths in the family Bible about that time.
He said that among people, most of us deal with about 200 of the same people on a weekly basis in our ordinary lives. After trying very hard for many days, he estimated that two dozen of the people he had known had died. About average.
He concluded by saying that he knew that killer flus were cyclic, and he fully expected that the Hong Kong flu of 1968, and then the Swine flu of 1976 was going to be the next big one. Both times he insisted that his family all spend a long time celebrating their lives and preparing for their deaths, so that they would not be taken unawares, and miss having one last joyous time together before some of them were taken away.
He died in 1980 of liver failure. But since he spoke with me I have taken over the watch for the killer flu, that some day will return.
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