Free Republic

MINNEAPOLIS — The United States reached its latest heartbreaking pandemic milestone Friday, eclipsing 700,000 deaths from COVID-19 just as the surge from the delta variant is starting to slow down and give overwhelmed hospitals some relief. It took 3 ½ months for the U.S. to go from 600,000 to 700,000 deaths, driven by the variant's rampant spread through unvaccinated Americans. The death toll is larger than the population of Boston

Haskell County, Kansas, lies in the southwest corner of the state, near Oklahoma and Colorado. In 1918 sod houses were still common, barely distinguishable from the treeless, dry prairie they were dug out of. It had been cattle country—a now bankrupt ranch once handled 30,000 head—but Haskell farmers also raised hogs, which is one possible clue to the origin of the crisis that would terrorize the world that year. Another clue is that the county sits on a major migratory flyway for 17 bird species, including sand hill cranes and mallards. Scientists today understand that bird influenza viruses, like human...

Your own best judgment determines what you do, if anything, to prepare for an epidemic of the Wuhan coronavirus. For myself, each round of information, as unreliable as it may be in its specifics, suggests an notable epidemic is more likely than not. There are a few things known with certainty. Pneumonia is, as with all flu, the common mode of fatality. 61.5% of patients requiring hospitalization and intense monitoring ended up becoming "non-survivors". Wuhan coronavirus has an incubation period of three to twenty-seven days, i.e., infected but without symptoms. Fourteen days is typical. Fever and cough are common, diarrhea...

Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, likened the rapid spread of Ebola to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. While the spread of AIDS scared society—largely because so much about it at the time was unknown—a better analogy to the spread of Ebola may be the infamous influenza epidemic of 1918. The scariest thing about the 1918 flu was that it killed not simply children, the old, and the infirm, but also those who were healthy and at the peak of physical fitness. In the United States, 99 percent of the flu’s victims were under 65...

The World Health Organization declared the first flu pandemic in 41 years, even as it stressed there are no signs the H1N1 virus has turned more lethal as it spreads across the globe. The declaration Thursday by the United Nations agency requires countries not yet exposed to the new influenza strain to roll out pandemic-prevention plans and step up monitoring efforts. It also will likely accelerate efforts to develop a vaccine, expected to take several months. WHO Director General Margaret Chan said the "overwhelming majority" of people diagnosed with the virus since it surfaced in Mexico in April experienced mild...

The body of Sir Mark Sykes - who died nearly 90 years ago from Spanish Flu - has been exhumed from his grave in the church of St Mary's, Sledmere, in a bid to help prevent a modern flu pandemic. The exhumation, on the morning of September 8, was carried out by a team led by one of the world's top virologists Prof John Oxford - Professor of Virology at Barts and The London, Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry. Prof Oxford previously told the Driffield Times: "If we can get samples, that will be wonderful for my team...

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...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Antibodies from survivors of the 1918 flu pandemic, the worst in human memory, still protect against the highly deadly virus, researchers reported on Sunday. The findings by a team of influenza and immune system experts suggest new and better ways to fight viruses -- especially new pandemic strains that emerge and spread before a vaccine can be formulated. These survivors, now aged 91 to 101, all lived through the pandemic as children. Their immune systems still carry a memory of that virus and can produce proteins called antibodies that kill the 1918 flu strain with surprising efficiency,...

Questions raised over safety of revived microbe.Kerri Smith   Natural Museum of Health and Medicine The 1918 influenza virus, which killed some 50 million people worldwide, has proved fatal to macaques infected in a laboratory. The study follows Nature's controversial publication1 of the virus's sequence in 2005, alongside a paper in Science that described the recreation of the virus from a corpse and its potency in mice2. Some scientists question the wisdom of reconstructing such a deadly virus. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Those who carried out the macaque study say yes, as a better understanding of how it...