NIH Radio
NIH scientists find earliest known evidence of 1918 influenza pandemic
Brief Description:
Scientists are learning lessons for future flu outbreaks by carefully examining evidence from past pandemics.
Transcript:
Balintfy: NIH researchers are studying a virus from a hundred years ago: the 1918 flu virus that caused a pandemic. At the time it was the worst infectious disease outbreak in recorded history that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide.
Taubenberger: Of course, we want to understand why that happened because we would hope ultimately to be able to prevent that from ever happening again.
Balintfy: Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger is a senior investigator at NIH.
Taubenberger: We're trying to understand how this virus got going in people and why it caused disease and how it killed people.
Balintfy: Dr. Taubenberger has been studying the genome or DNA of the 1918 flu virus for many years.
Taubenberger: One of the things that we found about the 1918 virus in the last 10 years of the effort to sequence the virus and to study how it behaves is that we think the 1918 virus is very bird-like in its characteristics. So we think that the origin of the virus was actually as a bird virus that somehow this bird virus adapted to humans.
Balintfy: More recently Dr. Taubenberger has been examining lung tissue and other autopsy material from 68 American soldiers who died in 1918 before the big outbreak.
Taubenberger: One thing that we unexpectedly found in this recent study were what could be precursor forms of the virus, virus that in a sense might not have been fully adapted to humans.
Balintfy: He says the 1918 flu virus began to circulate in just a few cases during the summer, without an apparent outbreak. Then by the fall of 1918 the virus mutated in a way that made it more infectious for humans. But Dr. Taubenberger adds that this recent study also shows that the virus, although lethal, didn’t kill alone.
Taubenberger: We think that in almost all cases in 1918, what actually ended up being the final blow and killing people were bacterial pneumonias. And we think that what happened would be that the virus would cause the pneumonia and damage your lung and set you up for a bacterial pneumonia.
Balintfy: Bacterial co-infections were found in all 68 of those American soldiers whose cases were studied. This data underscores the crucial role that bacterial infections can play in conjunction with any influenza virus, and the need for preparation by public health officials to prevent, detect and treat bacterial co-infections during future flu outbreaks.
Taubenberger: Indeed, the bird flu is a virus of great concern and luckily for us, it has not been able to be transmitted efficiently person to person, but that's something we worry about.
Balintfy: Dr. Taubenberger also reminds:
Taubenberger: Hands down, the absolute best way to prevent and deal with influenza is vaccination. Vaccination is an extremely important and essential public health tool not only for individual safety but to decrease the spread of the virus to the most susceptible in our population.
Balintfy: For more information on flu viruses and recent studies involving the 1918 pandemic, visit www.niaid.nih.gov. And to hear more from Dr. Taubenberger, tune in to episode 145 of NIH Research Radio. This is Joe Balintfy, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
About This Audio Report
Date: 10/04/2011
Reporter: Joe Balintfy
Sound Bite: Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger
Topic: virus, flu, flu virus, influenza, pandemic, 1918 flu, 1918 pandemic, flu outbreak, bird flu, pneumonia, bacteria, co-infection
Institute(s):
NIAID
Additional Info:
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/news/
newsreleases/2011/Pages/
early1918deaths.aspx
http://www.nih.gov/news/
radio/nihpodcast.htm
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