In 1918, a new and extraordinarily deadlyinfluenza virus swept countries around the world, in a pandemic that we are still studying today. Dr. Taubenberger: “The 1918 pandemic induced the world-wide deaths among probably fifty, andmaybe up to one hundred million people, performing it the worst natural disaster inall of recorded human history.” But what constructed the pandemics so dangerous? NIAID’sDr. Jeffery Taubenberger has been studying the 1918 flu for decades. Dr. Taubenberger: “Mostpeople who had influenza in 1918 had a entirely ordinary track of influenza, like you would see today, but in 1918, a really unusually high number of peopleended up having very severe illness, meaning that they actually developed apneumonia, an infection of their lungs, that started out as a viral pneumoniaand then rapidly progressed in most cases to a secondary bacterial pneumonia.They had no way to treat the viral infection, they had no way to treat thesecondary bacterial illness, so these people were just really left, in a certain sense, to suffer.And this process from initial onslaught of infection to death by bacterialpneumonias usually made around 10 or 11 days.” Ordinarily, influenza is most deadlyin the very young and the very old. But as Dr. David Morens explains, the 1918 virus was singular. Dr. Morens: “The two things that were different in 1918 is that the deaths in all those age groups were more than they had been in otherpandemics “that weve got” seen, and that there was a very high rate of demise inpeople between the ages of 20 and 40 which “ve never been” find before, andwhich has never been seen since.” To find out why the virus was so lethal, Dr.Taubenberger and other scientists retrieved tests of lung tissue, preserved in paraffin, from soldiers that had died of the flu.Eventually, with thehelp of tissue recovered from frozen organizations in Alaska, Dr. Taubenberger’steam was able to reconstruct the 1918 influenza virus. Dr. Taubenberger: “Unfortunately, when you look atthe genome of the virus, and just equate it on paper to other influenza viruses, nothing self-evident actually pops out at you of the reasons why it wouldbehave this way, and more we know that this virus is a really virulentpathogenic virus. One of the things the 1918 virus did, and does inexperimental animal sits, and there’s data be mentioned that that’s what happened inpeople, is the fact that it persuasion a really strong and very unusual kind ofinflammatory response so that the body’s response, immune response, to the virusitself contributed heavily to lung injure and pathology, and probablycontributed to serious illness and death.So it’s this very unusual inflammatoryresponse that’s one of its most important active investigate focuses of my laboratory, tounderstand why the 1918 virus induced that, and what perhaps we are also able do in thefuture to try to develop dopes that might target or restraint aspects of theinflammatory response as a method of treatment of severe viral infections.”.
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