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ST. LOUIS • On Oct. 5, 1918, the city health department issued this warning: “Avoid persons with colds.” Dr. Max C. Starkloff, health commissioner, knew that wasn’t nearly enough. Two days later, with Mayor Henry Kiel’s strong backing, he issued an emergency order closing schools, theaters, pool halls, playgrounds and other public places. The strategy was known as “social distancing,” and the motive was to fight the Spanish flu that was sweeping the world. The misnamed influenza would kill many more people than the ghastly meat-grinder known as the Great War. The order was extreme, but it worked — St....

A panel of infectious diseases experts this morning expressed far more grave concerns for Americans about the risks of flu and enterovirus D68 than for Ebola virus disease. That’s noteworthy because the group included Bruce Ribner, MD, MPH, the Emory University Hospital doctor who led the team that successfully treated two Ebola-infected medical missionaries, Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol. Infectious diseases caregivers and public health professionals are gathered in Philadelphia through the weekend for the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), more commonly known as IDWeek 2014. (You can also follow attendees in real-time on...

We've seen promising moves towards developing a universal or near-universal influenza vaccine, but researchers at the Donald P. Shiley BioScience Center have taken a different tack to ward of the crafty virus. Although the flu virus actively keeps the immune system from detecting it for a few days, giving it time to gain a foothold, the researchers have found that a powerful synthetic protein, known as EP67, can kick start the immune system so that it reacts almost immediately to all strains of the virus. Previously, EP67 had primarily been used to help activate the immune response by being added...

One Sunday in November 20-year-old Alani Murrieta of Phoenix began to feel sick and left work early. She had no preexisting medical conditions but her health declined at a frighteningly rapid pace, as detailed by her family and friends in local media and on BuzzFeed News. The next day she went to an urgent care clinic, where she was diagnosed with the flu and prescribed the antiviral medication Tamiflu. But by Tuesday morning she was having trouble breathing and was spitting up blood. Her family took her to the hospital, where x-rays revealed pneumonia: inflammation in the lungs that can...

compound found in the protective slime of an Indian frog blows apart flu viruses and might become a powerful new drug to treat influenza, researchers reported Tuesday. The compound, a small structure called a peptide, cured mice of killer doses of human flu, the research team reported in the journal Immunity. hey hope to develop it and other compounds like it into antiviral drugs to treat people. "This peptide kills the viruses. It kind of blows them up," Joshy Jacob of Emory University, who led the study team, told NBC News. And it seems harmless to healthy tissue. "There's no...

he mucus of a rare frog that lurks in the South Indian jungle could provide the basis of a powerful new class of drugs to combat influenza, scientists have said. The bright orange tennis ball-sized Hydrophylax bahuvistara was found to contain “host defence peptides” that proved able to destroy numerous strains of human flu, whilst protecting normal cells. Researchers are excited because the peptide showed it could bind to a protein that is identical across “dozens” of strains of the disease, increasing its potential potency as a drug. People would be advised to treat the Keralan amphibian with caution, however,...

Scientists say 'Enigma machine' has unlocked clues to the way the virus of the common cold assembles - making it possible to stop disease in its tracks A scientific breakthrough could herald an end to the common cold, after researchers found a way to “jam” the genetic code and stop the virus replicating. Experts said the discovery could allow scientists to design molecules which could “stop the virus in its tracks” - fending off colds and winter vomiting disease. Scientists from the Universities of Leeds and York used a computer-based model to identify a code in the viral genome, which...

I have had what seems like the flu or 2 or 3 weeks. It is a killer sore throat, moderate cough. But it is the sore throat that is killing me. Anyway, I just dragged myself out to Trader Joe's to buy something tempting and thought I would check out their tiny medicine section. I saw and bought Oscillococcinum which was hiding on the bottoms half. I know nothing about it except what I just learned in Wikipedia. Does anyone have experience with this stuff. The Amazon page with photos http://www.amazon.com/Boiron-Oscillococcinum-Flu-like-Symptoms-Pellets/dp/B0078W0QOI

Chinese researchers have discovered what they say is the first ‘virological penicillin’ – MIR2911, a molecule found naturally in a Chinese herb called honeysuckle. Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) is a well-known Chinese herb. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it has been used to effectively treat influenza infection for centuries. Several previous studies have confirmed that the herb, usually consumed in the form of a tea, can suppress the replication of influenza virus. However, the active anti-viral components and the mechanism by which they block viral replication have remained unclear. Now, a team of researchers headed by Dr Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University...

By The Week Staff August 30, 2014Think Ebola is alarming? Scientists expect a much deadlier virus to emerge in the not-distant future. How likely is a pandemic? Epidemiologists believe we're statistically overdue for a global viral outbreak, which occurs every generation or so. This year's Ebola crisis is probably just a dress rehearsal: Though the virus has killed at least 1,420 people in Africa in the last five months, Ebola is transmitted only through intimate contact with bodily fluids and doesn't have the global reach of a true pandemic, such as Spanish influenza in 1918. Humanity had no prior exposure...

University of California, Davis, researchers studying the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus, formerly referred to as "swine flu," have identified a group of immunologically important sites on the virus that are also present in seasonal flu viruses that have been circulating for years. These molecular sites appear to result in some level of immunity to the new virus in people who were exposed to the earlier influenza viruses. More than a dozen structural sites, or epitopes, in the virus may explain why many people over the age of 60, who were likely exposed to similar viruses earlier in life, carry antibodies...

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...

Editor's note: With fears of a swine flu pandemic rising daily, CNN Pentagon producer Larry Shaughnessy remembered a batch of letters from his grandfather, a World War I soldier who battled the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919."I'm coming, I'm coming For my head is bending low I hear those gentle voices calling Old Black Joe" As World War I rages in Europe, fresh U.S. Army soldiers pass the time on a train ride to to Camp Forrest, Georgia. "The boys are just starting to sing," Martin Aloysius Culhane wrote on September 6, 1918, to his friend back home. "They've gotten...

SUNDAY, Aug. 17 (HealthDay News) -- People who lived through the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million worldwide are still producing antibodies to the virus 90 years later, researchers report. "Most people have a notion that elderly people have very weak immunity or they have lost immunity," said lead researcher Dr. James E. Crowe Jr., a professor of pediatrics, microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University. "This study shows that extremely elderly people have retained memory of being infected with the 1918 flu, even 90 years later," Crowe said. This is the first evidence that shows that people developed significant...

The Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com Saline spray may help control fluBy Maggie FoxREUTERS NEWS AGENCYPublished November 30, 2004 Simply inhaling a saltwater spray could help prevent the spread of diseases including flu and tuberculosis, U.S. and German researchers reported yesterday.     They found a saline spray, administered using a device called a jet nebulizer, reduced the number of germ-spreading droplets by as much as 70 percent for six hours.     The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could provide a way to help control epidemics, such as the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome that spread...

SYNOPSIS The American military experience in World War I and the influenza pandemic were closely intertwined. The war fostered influenza in the crowded conditions of military camps in the United States and in the trenches of the Western Front in Europe. The virus traveled with military personnel from camp to camp and across the Atlantic, and at the height of the American military involvement in the war, September through November 1918, influenza and pneumonia sickened 20% to 40% of U.S. Army and Navy personnel. These high morbidity rates interfered with induction and training schedules in the United States and rendered...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpzxNoLZx0w

UCLA life scientists and their colleagues have discovered the first evidence of the H1N1 virus in animals in Africa. In one village in northern Cameroon, a staggering 89 percent of the pigs studied had been exposed to the H1N1 virus, commonly known as the swine flu. "I was amazed that virtually every pig in this village was exposed," said Thomas B. Smith, director of UCLA's Center for Tropical Research and the senior author of the research. "Africa is ground zero for a new pandemic. Many people are in poor health there, and disease can spread very rapidly without authorities knowing...

Examination of lung tissue and other autopsy material from 68 American soldiers who died of respiratory infections in 1918 has revealed that the influenza virus that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide was circulating in the United States at least four months before the 1918 influenza reached pandemic levels that fall. The study, using tissues preserved since 1918, was led by Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found proteins and genetic material from the 1918 influenza virus in specimens from 37 of...

WHAT: Secondary infections with bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia, were a major cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic and may be important in modern pandemics as well, according to a new article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases co-authored by David M. Morens, M.D., senior advisor to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers examined 13 studies published between 1918 and 1920. During this time, many scientists erroneously believed that influenza was caused by bacteria, not a virus. As a result, researchers...