My 10-year-old daughter was struck down with the flu two weeks ago. This is the second year in a row that she has gotten the virus even after receiving a flu shot. Indeed, throughout the months of January and February nearly all her friends and acquaintances were struck down with either influenza A or B. All them had gotten the trivalent vaccination. At the same time as the bizarre infections among her cohorts in Mid-Missouri, the coronavirus was spreading rapidly through China and causing terror throughout the world. Humankind seemingly cannot escape flu-like illnesses and viruses, no matter hard we try.
This has been the case throughout history. Perhaps the worst pandemic to ever befall mankind was the Spanish Flu of 1918. The SARS virus of 2003 had nearly the same death rate among those who were infected, although it was rapidly contained. Flu pandemics also hit the world in 1957-1958, 1968-1969, 1977-1978 and 2009-2010. These diseases, at times so terrifying in their severity and in the grotesque manner of death in its victims, have been the topic of a great number of books and movies over the past several years. “Influenza: The 100 Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History” by Dr. Jeremy Brown traces attempts to find ways to cure or at least ameliorate the cruel symptoms of flu and its deadly cousins such as coronaviruses. In most cases, these attempts have been futile and in many cases they have been harmful to the hapless victims trying to find some kind of remedy. Take the case of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu for instance. Tamiflu is not a cure. In fact, clinical studies show that, at its very best, the medicine reduces symptoms by a day. What is most troubling about Tamiflu are some adverse reactions experienced by patients, which, according to Brown, are listed as the following: vomiting, seizures and confusion among adolescents, heart attacks among elderly patents, just to name a few.
What most epidemiologists have been searching for over the last century is an answer to the question: what is the flu virus? Indeed, what are viruses themselves? They are not-quite-living things that cannot reproduce on a cellular level. The flu virus, much like the HIV virus, is constantly mutating. It can even mutate within a single flu season, meaning the vaccine often becomes less effective as the flu season moves into its late stages. Last year’s “Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris” by Mark Honigsbaum recounts our attempts to wipe-out, cure or inoculate against a whole range of viruses that crossed our plane of existence in the last 100 years. This nearly impossible task has been thwarted by incredible population growth in third world countries, ecological disasters and crumbling or non-existent public health infrastructure in the poorest places in the world.
Back to the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, an illness with an estimated worldwide death toll of 60 to 110 million people. In 2018 and 2019 several bestsellers came out commemorating the 100th anniversary of the illness. It was a horror of unfathomable proportions that some epidemiologists think killed more people than both World Wars combined. Perhaps the best known recent book about the Spanish Flu is “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu and How it Changed the World” by Laura Spinney. The book recounts the incredible speed of the progress of the disease through every corner of the world. Even the farthest reaches of the arctic were exposed to this terrible illness. Native villages were decimated in the Bristol Bay region in Alaska losing “40 percent of its population.” A landmark initial documentary of the 1918-1919 epidemic (incredibly, 85 years after it occurrence!) is “Influenza, 1918” through the American Experience series of programming on PBS. This film begs the question: “Why is it, after such incredible death and disruption to the social order, was the flu wiped from our collective consciousness?” What is also remarkable about the film is that most of the interviewees had been children during the epidemic and were still living when it was filmed in 2004. They add an extra depth to the documentary — most if not all of them lost at least one parent or sibling to the flu during 1918 and 1919.
What has become clear to scientists throughout the world is that as long as planet earth is still spinning around the sun, there will always be viruses. In fact, viruses have been so prevalent throughout human history that they have made fundamental imprints upon our DNA. In his little book “A Planet of Viruses” science writer Carl Zimmer explores in simple terms the virus world and the place they inhabit in the taxonomy of life: ”Viruses are unseen but dynamic players in the ecology of Earth. They move DNA between species, provide new genetic material for evolution, and regulate vast populations of organisms.” Viruses even inhabit the ocean in large numbers, where they exist off tiny microbes and plankton. What is guaranteed is that as long as there are viruses, there will be grave human sickness. But perhaps in the greatest paradox of all, there is some question if we would even exist without these tricky little non-living/living things.
