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[image alt="1918 Legacy Better Flu Shots" src="http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2018/01/1918-legacy-better-flu-shots-2-296x232.jpg" width="296" height="232" credit-source="Library%20of%20Congress" credit-via="AP" caption="US%20St%20Louis%20Red%20Cross%20Motor%20Corps%20on%20duty%20during%20the%201918%20Influenza%20epidemic" class="alignnone" /end]
THE DESCRIPTIONS ARE haunting.
Some victims felt fine in the morning and were dead by night. Faces turned blue as patients coughed up blood. Stacked bodies outnumbered coffins.
A century after one of history’s most catastrophic disease outbreaks, scientists are rethinking how to guard against another super-flu like the 1918 influenza that killed tens of millions as it swept the globe.
There’s no way to predict what strain of the shape-shifting flu virus could trigger another pandemic or, given modern medical tools, how bad it might be.
But researchers hope they’re finally closing in on stronger flu shots, ways to boost much-needed protection against ordinary winter influenza and guard against future pandemics at the same time.
“We have to do better and be better, we mean a universal flu vaccine. A vaccine that is going to protect you against essentially all, or most, strains of flu,” said Dr Anthony Fauci of the US National Institutes of Health.
Labs around the US are hunting for a super-shot that could eliminate the annual fall vaccination in favour of one every five years or 10 years, or maybe, eventually, a childhood immunisation that could last for life.
Fauci is designating a universal flu vaccine a top priority for NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Last summer, he brought together more than 150 leading researchers to map a path. A few attempts are entering first-stage human safety testing.
[image alt="Jason Plyler" src="http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2018/01/jason-plyler-2-296x203.jpg" width="296" height="203" credit-source="Carolyn%20Kaster" credit-via="AP" caption="Biologist%20Jason%20Plyler%20holds%20a%20plate%20containing%20immune%20cells%20ready%20for%20genetic%20analysis%20at%20the%20US%20Vaccine%20Research%20Centre" class="alignnone" /end]
Still, it’s a tall order. Despite 100 years of science, the flu virus too often beats our best defences because it constantly mutates.
Among the new strategies – Researchers are dissecting the cloak that disguises influenza as it sneaks past the immune system, and finding some rare targets that stay the same from strain to strain, year to year.
“We’ve made some serious inroads into understanding how we can better protect ourselves. Now we have to put that into fruition,” said well-known flu biologist Ian Wilson of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
The sombre centennial highlights the need.
Back then, there was no flu vaccine – it wouldn’t arrive for decades. Today, vaccination is the best protection, and Fauci never skips his. But at best, the seasonal vaccine is just 60% effective. Protection dropped to 19% a few years ago when the vaccine didn’t match an evolving virus.
If a never-before-seen flu strain erupts, it takes months to brew a new vaccine. Doses arrived too late for the last, fortunately mild, pandemic in 2009.
Lacking a better option, Fauci said the US is “chasing” animal flu strains that might become the next human threat. Today’s top concern is a lethal bird flu that jumped from poultry to more than 1,500 people in China since 2013. Last year it mutated, meaning millions of just-in-case vaccine doses in a US stockpile no longer match.
‘The mother of all pandemics’
The NIH’s Dr Jeffery Taubenberger calls the 1918 flu the mother of all pandemics.
He should know.
While working as a pathologist for the military, he led the team that identified and reconstructed the extinct 1918 virus, using traces unearthed in autopsy samples from World War I soldiers and from a victim buried in the Alaskan permafrost.
[image alt="1918 Legacy Better Flu Shots" src="http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2018/01/1918-legacy-better-flu-shots-3-296x228.jpg" width="296" height="228" credit-source="AP" caption="The%20American%20Oakland%20Municipal%20Auditorium%20in%20use%20as%20a%20temporary%20hospital%20during%20the%201918%20outbreak." class="alignnone" /end]
That misnamed Spanish flu “made all the world a killing zone”, wrote John M Barry in The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.
Historians think it started in Kansas in early 1918. By winter 1919, the virus had infected one-third of the global population and killed at least 50 million people, including 675,000 Americans. By comparison, the AIDS virus has claimed 35 million lives over four decades.
Three more flu pandemics have struck since, in 1957, 1968 and 2009, spreading widely but nowhere near as deadly. Taubenberger’s research shows the family tree, each subsequent pandemic a result of flu viruses carried by birds or pigs mixing with 1918 flu genes.
A quest for a new solution
The new vaccine quest starts with two proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, that coat flu’s surface. The “H” allows flu to latch onto respiratory cells and infect them. Afterward, the “N” helps the virus spread.
They also form the names of influenza A viruses, the most dangerous flu family.
With 18 hemagglutinin varieties and 11 types of neuraminidase – most carried by birds – there are lots of potential combinations. That virulent 1918 virus was the H1N1 subtype; milder H1N1 strains still circulate. This winter H3N2, a descendant of the 1968 pandemic, is causing most of the misery.
[image alt="Jason Plyler" src="http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2018/01/jason-plyler-3-296x209.jpg" width="296" height="209" credit-source="Carolyn%20Kaster" credit-via="AP" caption="Biologist%20Jason%20Plyler%20prepares%20plates%20containing%20immune%20cells%20for%20testing%20how%20the%20cells%20react%20to%20possible%20flu%20vaccines" class="alignnone" /end]
A turning point toward better vaccines was a 2009 discovery that, sometimes, people make a small number of antibodies that instead target spots on the hemagglutinin stem that don’t mutate. Even better, “these antibodies were much broader than anything we’ve seen”, capable of blocking multiple subtypes of flu, said Scripps’ Wilson.
Scientists are trying different tricks to spur production of those antibodies.
In a lab at NIH’s Vaccine Research Centre, “we think taking the head off will solve the problem”, Graham said. His team brews vaccine from the stems and attaches them to ball-shaped nanoparticles easily spotted by the immune system.
In New York, pioneering flu microbiologist Peter Palese at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine uses “chimeric” viruses to redirect the immune system.
In addition to working with Janssen Pharmaceuticals on a stem vaccine, Wilson’s team also is exploring how to turn flu-fighting antibodies into an oral drug.
Say a pandemic came along and you didn’t have time to make vaccine. You’d want something to block infection if possible.
Research difficulties
Yet lingering mysteries hamper the research.
Scientists now think people respond differently to vaccination based on their flu history. “Perhaps we recognise best the first flu we ever see,” said NIH immunologist Adrian McDermott.
The idea is that your immune system is imprinted with that first strain and may not respond as well to a vaccine against another.
“The vision of the field is that ultimately if you get the really good universal flu vaccine, it’s going to work best when you give it to a child,” Fauci said.
[image alt="Anthony Fauci" src="http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2018/01/anthony-fauci-296x205.jpg" width="296" height="205" credit-source="Carolyn%20Kaster" credit-via="AP" caption="Dr%20Anthony%20Fauci%2C%20director%20of%20the%20National%20Institute%20for%20Allergy%20and%20Infectious%20Diseases" class="alignnone" /end]
Still, no one knows the ultimate origin of that terrifying 1918 flu. But the key to its lethality was bird-like hemagglutinin.
That Chinese H7N9 bird flu “worries me a lot”, Taubenberger said.
For a virus like influenza that is a master at adapting and mutating and evolving to meet new circumstances, it’s crucially important to understand how these processes occur in nature. How does an avian virus become adapted to a mammal?
While scientists hunt those answers, “it’s folly to predict” what a next pandemic might bring, Fauci said.
“We just need to be prepared.”
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Germany Mark’s VE day with a public holiday?
Tune in next week when we celebrate International Women’s Day with Harvey Weinstein…
@Phil O’ Meara: danke
@Phil O’ Meara: Well they got what they wanted, they’ve taken over Europe, just took them another 50 years and less violence.
@Phil O’ Meara: I believe they refer to it as “Liberation Day”. Do you find them acknowledging their freedom from fascism so strange?
@Phil O’ Meara: Easter Sunday with Black and Tans anyone? Leo?
@Phil O’ Meara: what public holiday? No public holiday here in Germany
@Phil O’ Meara: Marking and celebrating are two different things. People all over the world mark the date of the Stephen’s day tsunami in Asia or 11th Sept.
@Phil O’ Meara: it’s not a public holiday in Germany, They do Celebrate Liberation Day, which refers to Freedom from Fascism,
@Phil O’ Meara: In the late 1940s the first Chancellor of post-war West Germany was Konrad Adenauer. He publicly denounced the ideology and practice of nazism. In the schools and elsewhere younger generations of Germans have been raised in a pro-democracy, anti-tyranny and pro-international ethos [ even if minority groups of neo-nazis have arisen despite this ] and Germany has also pursued a comprehensive foreign aid programme in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the 1970s Willy Brandt as Chancellor visited Auschwitz and, although not religious in outlook, momentarily knelt at a monument to the holocaust. No modern state has publicly acknowledged and repented its recent evils in the way that Germany has.
@Dearbhal Teresa Cannon: I think it just in Berlin Dearbhal.
@KEN L: My IRA grand uncle was killed by the British army in 1921. He is not human sewage and a great many people around Ireland would take exception to your comment.
@Phil O’ Meara: Open a history book sometime Phil. One that explains what life was like for German people during WW2. Why shouldn’t they also celebrate their liberation from fascism?
@Garreth Byrne: Now compare how England has acknowledged and repented its centuries of colonialism and slaughter. Oh wait….
@KEN L: Oppression breeds resistance.
@Phil O’ Meara: Actually, it wasn’t all of Germany,it was Berlin. One of the federal states. A state obviously more progressive than yourself.
My grandfather got kill on that day in Berlin. He fought on the Eastern Front under Soviet command all the way to the Battle of Berlin.
@KEN L: Best and most under-rated war movie ever
My uncle left the Irish army and flew Lancaster’s with the RAF
@Richard Russell: good on him!
Did he return to Ireland after the war and how was he received?
Have read that soldiers who left the Irish army and fought with the British army were charged with desertion and stripped of pension rights etc and barred from working in the public service.
Would be interested in your views?
@Charles Alexander: desertion in wartime is an offence in all armies including those who of neutrals.
@Brendan Greene: I wasn’t disputing that well known fact but thanks.
@Charles Alexander: actually as I understand it some did not leave the Irish army but technically deserted the Irish army and joined the UK forces while still a serving member of the Irish Defence Forces and therefore are, by definition, deserters.
I may be incorrect but my understanding is that there was no action taken against Irish people in general who were free to go to the UK and join the Allied armies… it is only those who joined the UK army (and I assume if would have applied to any joining the German army as well) while a serving member of the Irish Army.
“An estimated 5,000 Irish soldiers joined the Allies in fighting Nazi Germany during World War II but were persecuted upon their return to Ireland for having deserted the Defence Forces.
They were denied all pay and pension rights and prevented from working for the State for a period of seven years” – https://www.thejournal.ie/defence-forces-amnesty-world-war-two-721706-Dec2012/
There were some anomalies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPO_362 – read more here – but most enlisted soldiers who desert are subject to court martial all over the world.
I am not agreeing or disagreeing with what happened just expanding upon the facts.
@Niall Ó Cofaigh: my father was in the LDF during the war years while one of his friends was a capt a in in the Irish Armu and another was a Lietenant in the Royal Engineers serving with the 8th Army (Desert Rats) in North Africa. As a teenager I eavesdropped on their conversations.
I was astonished to learn that the higher pay the British Army were offering was an incentive for some to desert rather than higher motives.
@Richard Russell: did he get a medal?
@Niall Ó Cofaigh: my understanding also. A very interesting part of our history.
Many thanks for the attached – much appreciated.
“If the British soldiers who went up the beaches of Normandy could see England now they would not have gone 40 yards up that beach”
- David Irving
@KEN L: Well David Irving doesn’t think the Holocaust was a thing, so that should tell you all you need to know about him and the nonsense you just quoted.
@KEN L: David Irving? Why not throw in a quote from Lord Haw Haw!
@KEN L: Quoting pro-Nazi ‘historians’ is never a good look.
Or as the daily mail called it the other day
Victory OVER Europe day.
Such nonsense
@Barry: Such an educated bunch that work for the daily fail.
@Barry: That would be the same Daily Mail that was very keen on Herr Hitler right up until 1st September 1939.
Fair play. Was anticipating the usual cacophony of Brit bashing and one upmanalship so common on the Journal. Pleasantly surprised and given an insight into the Irish who joined the allies.
@Jack Inman: My dad’s uncle served in the RAF from 1942-43. Ground crew, not sure where. Had to put up with a lot of anti Irish bullying. Stupid Mick, Spud muncher, the usual sort of stuff. Went AWOL and got a ferry back to Dublin.
And in Poland? You know the place that had 1/5th of their population killed?
It was Russia that really defeated and destroyed the nazis,the yanks and brits won the smaller battles
@tuco: Of course The Soviet Union made great sacrifices in the defeat of Nazi Germany and it must be never never be forgotten. But to for example describe the Normandy landings as a smaller battle ..and remember it wasnt just British and American troops that made liberated France, Belgium, Denmark etc but many other nations too. So what is exactly your point?
Why no report on Russia the country that most turned the tide in WW2 and suffered the bigest loss of life?????
Glory to the Soviet Union, victor in chief of the anti fascist war!
Long live the memory of the outstanding leadership of Joseph Stalin!
Mairfidh a ainm go deo
@Micheál: i don’t think the millions who perished in the Siberian labour camps would share your view!
Stalin was an ansolute monster.
@Micheál: Uncle Joe to you little Michael. One of the few men in history who surpasses Hitler for brutality.
You do realise that the Russians beat the Nazi invaders despite Stalin, not because of him.
Idolising a paranoid psychopath says alot about you.
@Micheál:
Anti communist lies and distortions!
The bourgeoisie will never forgive Stalin for his principled and pro human outlook..let alone credit him with the victory over Hitler.
The Soviet soldiers went to battle with the cry “for the Motherland and Stalin!”
Hence, inter alia, the votes for women in France in 1946 and the NHS in Britain and other concessions to the working class after the war
@Micheál:
Who supported The Spanish Republic?
Who asked (in vain) the “democracies” for collective security against Hitler (in vain)?
Who offered to defend Czechoslovakia?
Who wanted the denazification if Germany post bellum?
Whom did the nazis fear most?
Who never fire bombed the German cities?
-Joseph Vissariónovich Stalin
@Micheál:
Whom did the nazis serve after the war?
To whom did they preferably surrender?
Did they have a good reason to do so?
What personnel set up the (West) German intelligence and police in 1949?
It’s all documented!
@Micheál: Yep, that’s the chap who said one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic. Lovely chap, our Uncle Joe.
@Eric Dunn:
Eric, that is black propaganda, he never said that.
Put it beside his factual historical record and his writings and you will see
Arc of Triumph?
Did the BBC not roll out Capt Moore?
@MarkQ: no itv have program about him tonight tho
Victory that ensured Ireland could truly become an independent republic and not at best a puppet State of a new London.
have your say