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With the Covid 19 pandemic and the distancing measures that accompanied it, we had practically forgotten about the other seasonal viruses. It’s time to the flu it’s back to strike it’s starting to scare us. The epidemic this year in fact started earlier, and is putting an anomalous number of people to bed (at least for the period): in Italy they have already reached over two and a half millionand the incidence, with more than 760 thousand syndromes influence them or paraflu in the last week alone, it’s already approaching what it normally is peak epidemic, which is seen in the first weeks of the new year. If it continues at this rate, in short, it looks like it a bad flu season. To what extent it is impossible to say. But luckily we have vaccines that work, drugsAnd hospitals. Which should prevent it from reaching the catastrophic proportions of some of the worst flu pandemics of the last century. Curious to know which ones? Here are some examples.
Influenza pandemics
What makes it particularly dangerous a flu epidemic? The virus that causes it, of course. There are four types, identified by the first four letters of the alphabet. But they are only the first two, A and B, regular contributors to seasonal influenza epidemics (and for this reason they are included in the annual vaccines), and only type A was responsible, as far as we know, of pandemics. According to the current consensus, these occur when the virus – which as we know is constantly accumulating small changes in its genetic material – undergoes a mutation particularly radicalwhich at the same time renders useless the immune defenses accumulated over the years by the population, and provides the new pathogen with a high capacity to infect the human beings. When this perfect storm hit, the world was faced with a new flu pandemic.
The bad news is that a new strain of influenza A virus appears to be circulating again this year. It has been called H3N2 “Darwin”by the researchers who first isolated it in Australia, where usually the new flu viruses destined to animate the winter epidemics in the northern hemisphere appear. It presents several novelties with respect to the viruses of the strain H3N3 that circulated in past years, but although there are those who also speak of greater severity and infectious capacity, for now there is no evidence that it has the characteristics necessary to cause authentic, new, pandemic flu. Also because, fortunately, the epidemiological surveillance worked properly, and is one of the four new stumps viral included by WHO in this year’s flu vaccine. And towards which the weakest (and therefore potentially at risk) sections of the population should be, hopefully in a high percentage of cases, protected.
1889–1890, the “Russian”
None of this, of course, was possible over a century ago, when one of the deadliest influenza pandemics of the last century and a half broke out at the end of the 19th century. And also one of the first to be followed, and recounted, constantly by newspapers around the world. The first reports of the new disease came from the city of Bukharain Uzbekistanin the May of 1889. From here the virus took several months to spread until it reached St.Pietroburgo, where the first cases began to appear in November. At that point, however, by exploiting a much more widespread and developed transport network the virus began to run throughout Europe: the northern nations (Sweden, Denmark and Norway) were reached in a few weeks; by December it had already arrived in the German Empire, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, and had crossed the ocean, also affecting cities in the United States.
In the first months of 1890 the virus had spread all over the world, causing a very high number of victims. There was no cure and no preventive measures were known with which to stop the circulation of viral agents (whose existence it was not yet fully recognized by the scientific community), and at the end of the following year, when the pandemic finally lost its strength, the disease had done about a million victims worldwide. An impressive number, especially considering that the whole era population world did not exceed one and a half billion people. There are still some doubts about the virus responsible for the disaster: the research carried out in recent decades had initially led to think that it was a new strain of H1N1then the finger was pointed at the subtype instead H3 (perhaps H3N8), and lastly, it has recently been speculated that it could be a new one coronavirusnot different from SARS-CoV-2especially for some features epidemiologicalsuch as mortality concentrated almost exclusively in the elderly population, unlike the flu which tends to be fatal even in the very young.
1918–1920, the “Spanish”
Speaking of casualties, none pandemic flu can compete with the one that broke out at the end of the First World War: the sadly famous Spanish flu, which with several waves over two years killed a number of people estimated to be between 20 and 100 million. A curiosity in this case concerns the name with which it went down in history: it is in fact not clear where the pandemic originated, but having begun to spread during the last months of the war in many belligerent nations, newspapers were not allowed to cover up the outbreak of cases, potentially damaging to the morale of the population; alone in Spainat the time neutral, the disease was described freely in the pressgiving the impression that it was a local emergency, and leaving the country’s name indelibly associated with the pandemic.
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