A bird perched at the mouth of the opening of the pandemic killed 50 million people

Many people also believe that the Spanish flu will destroy mankind, complete what the war just ended has not done yet.

In September 1918, the First World War was coming to an end. In Manchester, a long line of soldiers and female workers poured out on both sides of the road to welcome Prime Minister Lloyd George, their war leader.

In the middle of the line of people lining up from Piccadilly train station to Albert Square, nothing could stop George's happiness, especially when the Allies still sent the winning news to the continuity.

However, that evening, returning to the town hall, the prime minister saw a sore throat, he was feverish and paralyzed. During the next 10 days, George was so weak that he could not walk and had to wear a snorkel. The British press then concealed the prime minister's illness, fearing that the Germans could use the news to propagate the coup.

Only those closest to George knew that he was very ill.

The British prime minister was later rescued, but many of his people were not so fortunate. Outside Manchester City Hall, the Spanish flu kills 150 people in the city after just one week of outbreaks.

Across 95 cities in England and Wales, similar levels of death have been recorded. A total of 7,740 people were killed in the first week of November alone. There are more flowers, than the graves that grow up next to the young British men who lie down by German guns.

By the time the Spanish flu hit the city of Manchester, Ada Darwin was only seven years old. She lives with her parents and 5 siblings in a house in Greenheys district. "It was Sunday, November 17, when I was carried to my bed by my mother , " Ada said. "I remember my head hurt so I told her not to let Norah talk, she made me a headache."

In fact, headaches and fever are one of the first symptoms of Spanish flu. Ada was infected, followed by her mother, 34-year-old Jane Berry, her 2-month-old sister Edith, followed by 9-year-old brother Frederick, 2-year-old brother Austin, 4-year-old Noel and older sister Norah, 12 years old.

Spanish flu is developing very rapidly, causing pleural effusion and causing the victim to "drown" by the liquid inside his body. The death of Spanish flu is characterized by cyanotic patches on the body, a proof that the lungs are flooded and no longer absorb enough oxygen.

Ada is lucky not to face such a death, but her mother does. On Tuesday, November 19, the Ada family was infected, grandmother and Aunt Annie had to come and pick up the little girl and brother Austin. The doctor said the two children's illnesses were milder, so they needed to be separated from the other members.

"I remember her eyes looking at me, when I changed clothes to go with Aunt Annie , " Ada said. "She looked very sad. At that time I was thinking simply because I had to leave her for a while, but now that I think about it, I realized she was sad because she knew she would never see me again."

Mother Ada died the next day. Next, Noel and her father Frederick Berry, a 38-year-old officer of the Royal Army, became ill when serving at the Salford Medical Institute. Their funeral was celebrated on November 29 according to the military rite. Ada remembers the moment the funeral caravan passed the elementary school that year.

"It's like a movie playing in my head," she said. "The black horses on the ostrich feather mane followed by soldiers holding guns and the coffin of my father covered with the British flag. My mother's coffin was placed in a hearse with a large glass box, Noel's coffin was placed under the driver's seat, and my grandmother told us that my mother had come to Jesus, but I said Jesus had a lot of people around, and I wanted my mother to come back. "

Ada and the rest of her brothers and sisters are not the only children to be orphaned because of the epidemic that year.

It is estimated that Spanish flu infects one third of the world's population, only in three outbreaks between 1918 and 1919. It kills 250,000 people in the UK, 676,000 in the United States, 400,000 in Japan. 1.85 million Indians, equivalent to 6% of the population and 138,000 Egyptians, equivalent to 10% of the population.

In areas separate from the world, where populations of people do not accumulate immunity to influenza, they have to suffer even more. West Samoa, an island nation in the Pacific, was wiped out to a quarter of the population. The entire Inuit community and indigenous people living in Alaska were also killed.

Worldwide, Spanish flu has killed 50-100 million people , 5-10 times more than the number of soldiers killed in World War I. Too many deaths cause the society to stagnate. Health system overloaded. There is no place for funerals, people have to dig mass graves.

In the United States, many companies have to close because workers are sick. Basic services such as mail delivery and garbage collection also do not work. Some farms leave their crops ripe because there are no harvesters.

In the 1919 fate, between the time when antibiotics and vaccines were not yet available, many believed that the Spanish flu would destroy mankind, fulfilling what the World War had just ended did not.

However, at the end of 1919, the great Spanish ended. It ended abruptly, not because humans found a way to control the virus, but because it killed all infected people, and developed immunity on people. lucky to survive.

When corpses of victims decompose in the ground, the Spanish flu virus is also extinct. It buried itself with so many mysteries that even scientists cannot explain.

Where does the Spanish flu start? Not from Spain as the name implies, it is called the Spanish flu because it is a neutral country in the world where reports of disease were first publicized. (In countries belonging to the two warring factions, information about the disease is hidden due to concerns of being used by the enemy).

Unlike regular flu attacks that only attack the elderly and children under 5 years of age, why does Spanish flu kill even the most healthy, healthy adults between the ages of 20-40?

What lessons can we learn from this most dangerous pandemic in history, to learn from or prepare for future epidemics?

Jeffrey Taubenberger wears two-layer gloves, wears a gas mask and wears a tight-fitting suit like the medical workers present in West Africa during the Ebola pandemic. He is a virologist, head of molecular pathology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Taubenberger was forced to do so, even having to scan the iris to have access to a US research facility, which was under the control of the FBI.

Reason? One of the freezers here is containing a very dangerous specimen, which, if accidentally let out, or somehow terrorists get it, the disaster can be triggered on the rules. Global tissue.

What makes the FBI watch so carefully, nothing else, is the rarest Spanish flu virus left. They were collected from the bodies of American soldiers who died of the 1918-1919 pandemic and also the corpses of Inuit people in Alaska, stored in permafrost.

"It was as if I were opening a world-class secret," Taubenberger described. He has been doing this for 30 years, studying the Spanish flu virus to decipher the mystery of the most dangerous pandemic in history.

The work began in 1990, Taubenberger and colleagues have been able to collect fragments of RNA shattered in the bodies of Spanish flu viruses. By 1995, they had arranged them into the first eight genes.

The project lasted a decade later, when Taubenberger completed the last three genes of about 13,000 base pairs in the viral genome in 2005. The work was voted by both the leading scientific journals Science and Lancet. The breakthrough of the year by genetic sequencing, means that the Spanish flu virus is ready to revive, the mysteries will be answered.

Taubenberger transferred the genome he arranged to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Here, they were introduced into the cell by virologist Terrence Tumpey to replicate the Spanish flu virus, reviving a leading killer killer in history.

They tested this virus with animals, first the mice. In the first trial, the revived Spanish flu virus killed mice in just 3-5 days, with symptoms that were exactly what he had done to humans in 1918.

Tumpey, Taubenberger and study authors reported that the virus also killed chicken embryos. Finally, they also assume the mystery: Spanish flu is actually a subtype of, infecting poultry.

The danger point is that the Spanish flu virus does not need to cross with human influenza viruses to infect us, but it can jump straight from birds to humans and make them sick.

Tests on mice show that the H1N1 virus causing Spanish flu is extremely toxic, it can replicate a viral load of 39,000 times more than today's strains. Once the infection is successful, the virus will live in a variety of cells including lung and bronchial cells, leading to secondary infection and disease.

In the 2007 study, scientists infected monkeys with the Spanish flu virus, thereby successfully replicating typical symptoms recorded from the 1918 pandemic.

Monkeys have died from a cytokine storm (the immune system overreacts, producing too many white blood cells and cytokines cause inflammation to fight the virus - white blood cells attack healthy cells and killing the sick).

This explains why young people with Spanish flu, who have the most active immune systems, are more likely to die from the disease.

It complements another hypothesis that explains that older people who had been exposed to a previous strain of H1N1 flu, have partially trained their immune systems against the Spanish flu. In contrast, younger people living in 1918 have an immunological blind spot. Only 28-year-olds became only one time exposed to the "Russian flu" virus in 1890, an H3 strain with a completely different gene structure.

So where does the Spanish flu virus originate? Until now it was still a question without solution. We know that there is a huge amount of live virus parasitic on animals like bats, wild birds, monkeys . They are called "zonoses" .

The rate of cross-infection of zonoses to humans is very low, but once it occurs, disaster will be triggered. We have the Ebola pandemic, when the virus jumps from bat to human. Zika breaks out when the virus spreads from the monkey. Even the HIV / AIDS epidemic started from such a cross-infection.

The Spanish flu virus is no exception, it is an avian influenza strain. According to the hypothesis proposed by British virologist John Oxford, a wild bird carrying an influenza virus emigrated near the mouth of the Somme river at Etaples in Boulogne, France.

Here, the virus meets all necessary conditions to spread to humans and causes pandemic outbreaks: an environment for wild waterfowl, a population of chickens and pigs, a barracks where 100,000 British soldiers are stationed. under conditions of dirty and stifling trenches.

As a result, in the winter of 1917, hundreds of British soldiers became ill with flu-like symptoms. The medical team at Etaples recorded 156 deaths. At that time, the disease was called "purulent bronchitis". But when comparing the symptoms, the scientists found that these soldiers were also cyanotic, especially on their lips, ears and cheeks because of the oxygen - the characteristics of the Spanish flu.

We do not carve, but it is most likely that the most dangerous epidemic in history has begun.

A century after the largest pandemic, we can rest assured when the Spanish flu virus is definitely extinct in the natural environment. Even the corpses preserved in permafrost since 1918 cannot contain viruses that survive, Taubenberger confirmed.

But some strains of the H1N1 strain causing the Spanish flu continue to be spread among its descendants, including the H3N2 virus that caused Hong Kong flu in 1968, and H1N1 that caused the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

Like the Spanish flu, the H5N1 virus also has genes that allow it to jump straight from poultry to humans and cause illness.

"The 1918 pandemic has established a very successful mechanism for human infection for avian influenza virus, and it has never disappeared in the last 100 years. Spanish flu is really the mother of all pandemics. " , Taubenberger said.

Statistics show that on average every 30 years, people will face an influenza pandemic. After the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918-1919 was the raging of Asian flu (1957-1958), Hong Kong flu (1968-1969) and swine flu (2009) . These are the three pandemics, above the other smaller flu pandemic such as H5N1 bird flu in Asia in 2006-2007.

Although a lot of experience has been accumulated from outbreaks of influenza, scientists still believe that people have never been prepared to face a destructive flu virus on a global scale like disease in 1918.

If a similar flu virus breaks out again, computer simulations suggest that it will still cause terrible devastation, with more than 300,000 Americans still dying, worldwide figures could rise. to 150 million.

Human weakness in 1918, that is, we face war. Influenza virus appears to be dangerous in the conditions of battlefields, dirty and moldy trenches. Economic recession leaves a high proportion of malnourished and easily affected population. And when doctors were withdrawn to the front line to take care of soldiers, hospitals and health systems in the rear, there was not enough capacity to stop the pandemic.

A hundred years later, we have been living in a basic world of peace, economic development and an upgraded health system. But other challenges have been raised, including: demographic change, urbanization, and the development of civil aviation, antibiotic resistance and climate change.

Dr. Carolien Van de Sandt at the Peter Doherty Institute for Immunology at the University of Melbourne said: "Currently, we are facing new challenges including aging population, people living with fat disease. Obesity and diabetes ".

Van de Sandt and her team checked the data on the Spanish flu, Asian flu, 1968 Hong Kong influenza and swine flu in 2009. They predicted that the next influenza pandemic could very well be is an avian influenza strain that infects humans.

The speed of spread will be very fast and occur on a worldwide scale through air travel. There are many conditions that allow this pandemic to exceed the Spanish flu in 1918.

A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, said the next epidemic would erupt and spread in the developed world, when a high proportion of the population is facing obesity and diabetes.

"What we know from the 2009 pandemic is that people with certain diseases (such as obesity and diabetes) are more likely to be hospitalized and die from the flu," said Kirsty Short, from the University of Queensland. The team warns that the world continues to face a "double burden" when malnutrition is still prevalent in poor countries.

Global warming can also work in a different way. Van de Sandt says that many strains of influenza come from birds, so when the planet is warmed, the infection pattern will change, which will surprise us.

"Climate change changes the patterns of bird migration, bringing latent viruses to new locations and potentially turning many birds into hosts , " she said.

Antibiotic resistance is also a problem. Most of the victims were killed in the 1918 flu pandemic because of secondary bacterial infections, something that antibiotics helped ease in the next pandemic.

But antibiotics are increasingly resistant to bacteria. Katherine Kedzierska, from the University of Melbourne's Doherty Institute, said: "This increases the risk of dying from secondary infections in the next outbreak when it breaks out."

What about the vaccine? It was a race against time.

In essence, we cannot predict which strains of the virus will cause the next pandemic - if this is done, scientists will be able to develop a vaccine specifically for the influenza strain and High pillow.

However, only the influenza A strain alone has about 144 subtypes continuously changing each year, not to mention flu B, C and D. Scientists cannot create a vaccine- apply only, permanently specific to all strains of this flu.

What they can do is just follow the mutations every year and create the best vaccine, which is relatively effective for next year's flu season only. This vaccine is unlikely to protect against all strains of influenza and may lose completely in the flu season next year.

So, most likely, the script will take place like this:

People try to create vaccines to prevent the most dangerous strains of influenza. But there will be a strain of influenza that is beyond the effectiveness of vaccines and develops into fluids. Megacities, climate change and the popularity of civil aviation will promote viral spread. Meanwhile, antibiotic resistance, poverty in less developed countries and obesity and diabetes in developed countries will push the number of deaths to high levels.

With the latest techniques today, pharmaceutical companies will take 3-6 months to produce vaccines against the new influenza strain. During that time, humanity simply did not have any protection other than wearing a mask, limiting to crowded places and washing hands often.

When asked what she thought of a new flu pandemic, Ada said: "At my age, I don't have to worry. But [a new flu pandemic] will be a big concern for my generation of grandchildren." . The world is a far cry from 100 years ago, "now people often kiss very naturally, kisses can spread the virus. I even see men embracing each other dearly. Nobody does it. in 1918 ".