I was watching a television show yesterday and the premise of the episode was that a terrorist group had broken into an old abandoned USPHS lab and stole samples of the original strain to use as a biological weapon. It got me thinking, is that particular version of the flu virus still particularly dangerous? I know H1N1 strains are still dangerous and have been responsible for a few more pandemics since the Spanish flu but it seems that we should have some resistance to the strain that caused that pandemic. My reasoning is that it never went away. We didn’t beat the Spanish flu with vaccines and health measures rather it just killed pretty much everyone it could and we eventually developed a level of resistance to it that made its threat more in line with the seasonal flu. If my reasoning is correct then the terrorists releasing the virus in the subway shouldn’t be any more dangerous that someone with the flu taking the subway to work which is a common occurrence during flu season.
So, how does it actually work? Did we develop a resistance like I think or would a release of the original strain start a new pandemic?
The original Spanish Flu would absolutely fuck us up.
The reason it became mild has nothing to do with us building immunity but because a virus killing its host is bad for business (or strictly speaking, reproduction). A lack of viable hosts puts pressure on the virus’s gene pool and in the end, the variant that is most successful at spreading and reproducing will win out.
That means not killing your host and only doing mild, repairable damage to other potential hosts so that humans don’t take an infection so seriously.
We saw this exact pattern with COVID, with successive iterations being less deadly than the last.
My understanding is that it’s still with us, but it’s evolved over time to be much less deadly, and that that’s the biggest reason it’s not much of a problem for us. We probably have some more immunity to the original strain because of our exposure to the evolved version, so I doubt the original would be as much of a problem as it was in 1918 (and because medicine has drastically improved), but it might not be a walk in the park.
Seems like a shitty weapon of you can’t control it and it’s going to end up impacting your own people as much as anyone else, but maybe the terrorists in the show didn’t care.
I don’t know, but last month three people in my family, including one who is on immuno blockers, caught swine flu from 2009 (verified by PCR) and did have cold-like symptoms, but no hospitalization or other complications and no longer than a week. We got it tested because one sick person is non verbal and has a history of pneumonia, so whenever she gets a bad cough I take her to have someone listen to her lungs and this time they opted to test for the strain. I kind of wish we could do that more often as it’s very interesting to know and see these things come around. They all had this year’s flu vaccine, which every year includes some h1n1 variant, as had everyone else in the house who didn’t get sick at all. So anecdotally and unscientifically, I would say Spanish flu is not a threat, especially if you’ve been getting flu vaccines every year.
Immuno blockers suck. My mom has an autoimmune disorder and has been on them for decades to control it. They’re better than not being able to control her disorder of course but every minor bug that goes around is a serious issue for her. Glad this round went well for your family.
There are many factors at play.
Survivability is much higher. A lot of the deaths are attributable to secondary opportunistic infections that are now treatable with antibiotics, which did not exist at the time. We now have a plethora of treatments that did not exist at the time, for example many people were saved from death by covid by giving extra oxygen for just a few days. That would have helped h1n1 victims too.
Here’s a Stuff You Should Know podcast about it. I remember listening to this when it first came out and then the pandemic hit like a year later. I need to revisit it…
