Almost every inhabitant of the planet Earth is familiar with this disease. We all get the flu once or twice a year. Many even regard this disease as something inevitable, ironically remarking: "If the flu is treated, it will go away in seven days, if not treated, it will go away in a week."
In the meantime, remember how the brutal Martians from The War of the Worlds by HG Wells were defeated. They were not defeated by the cannons of the earthlings, but by the enemy they never saw - the flu virus. Moreover, the science fiction novel, which came out of print in 1898, turned out to be somewhat prophetic. The writer not only predicted the coming "war of the worlds", but also its invisible winner. After all, it is known that from the Spanish flu in the First World War, about 20 million people died - more than on the western and eastern fronts combined.
The Spanish flu, or "Spanish flu" was most likely the most massive influenza pandemic in the history of mankind in absolute numbers, both in terms of the number of people infected and the number of deaths.
the flu comes to us know where from? From space … However, let's take everything in order.
The first person to describe a flu-like illness was Hippocrates. We are all familiar with these symptoms - a sharp rise in temperature, pain in the head and muscles, redness and sore throat. And the main feature of the disease is its extreme contagiousness. As soon as one fell ill, after contact with him, dozens of people fell ill in a couple of days, and in a week hundreds of people. This is how epidemics began. In historical annals, cases of pandemics are recorded, i.e. epidemics that covered entire countries and continents.
Epidemics were quite frequent, and approximately every 25-30 years they took on the character of a worldwide disaster. Therefore, the best medical forces of the planet were thrown into the recognition of the roots of this disease, the search for control over it. Scientists have considered different theories of the occurrence of influenza - from the influence of "influenza" constellations to the initial stage of cholera and the influence of the Earth's electromagnetic field.
Only in 1889, during another flu epidemic, the German scientist Richard Pfeiffer isolated from the sputum of patients a very small bacterium, similar to a stick, which was immediately named "Pfeifer's stick" and was identified as the cause of the flu. But antibiotics had not yet been invented by that time, and the treatment of influenza was still an insurmountable task.
Promotional video:
In 1918, as already mentioned, the largest influenza pandemic began, which claimed more lives than all the hostilities of the First World War.
The first wave of the pandemic lasted ten months, during which time the infection managed to spread throughout the world. There were also the second and third waves, no less terrible than the first. In two years, the flu took away about 2.5% of the world's population, i.e. according to various sources, from 20 to 40 million people.
People died in a day - a person got up healthy in the morning, the temperature rose sharply during the day, and by evening he was dying. If, by some miracle, it was possible to survive and overcome the first course of the disease, then it was practically impossible to avoid death - the person died later from complications caused by the flu, for example, from pneumonia. And one more feature was in the Spanish flu - this flu affected only the adult population of mankind, bypassing children and the elderly.
After the pandemic in the field of doctors and scientists, the question of finding a cure for influenza arose. But how to find it if doubts arose about the bacterial nature of the occurrence of influenza? After all, if all epidemics were caused by the same bacillus, then why were they so different from each other?
In 1931, American Richard Shoupe made a discovery: the flu is caused by a virus! At first, many were skeptical about this discovery, but two years later, the virus that causes the disease in humans (Orthomixovirus influenzae) was discovered. However, all attempts to infect experimental animals with "influenza A virus", on which the researchers are used to testing all their theories and methods, have been unsuccessful. The animals stubbornly refused to get sick. And they were about to reject the theory of the viral origin of influenza, when suddenly such an incident happened.
American explorer Wilson Smith, making another round of animals, saw a sluggish ferret. When he picked him up, the ferret sneezed, and a couple of days later Wilson Smith fell ill with the flu. Thus, for the first time, an experimental influenza infection took place, which made it possible to isolate the virus causing the disease.
Over the next seven years, viruses of type B and C were also isolated, studied and experimentally confirmed.
Quite a lot is known about these viruses now. For example, the type A virus causes diseases of moderate to severe severity not only in humans, but in birds, horses, pigs, and ferrets. It is this type virus that causes all pandemics. The type B virus infects only humans, most often children are ill with it, the disease causes local outbreaks of epidemics. The type C virus has been much less studied, perhaps because it is the mildest form of the human virus. It does not cause epidemics and serious complications, and therefore do not pay special attention to it.
So the enemy is known. It is necessary to find measures to combat it. But it turned out to be not so easy. The virus itself is just a chain of nucleic acids that carry genetic information and are protected by an envelope. Viruses are so small that it is usually impossible to catch and kill it in the air. No one even suspects of its existence until the viruses begin to multiply, invading the body of a person or animal, giving rise to a disease.
Moreover, while the incubation period is underway (from several hours to several days) and the virus is actively multiplying, even the infected person himself does not feel any particular ailment. Only when the number of diseased cells reaches a critical mass does a person fall ill. But then, as they say, it is too late to drink Borjomi, to take some preventive measures.
The illness can last from one to several weeks, depending on the state of the immune system. Having learned to recognize the virus, the immune forces gradually destroy diseased cells, creating a powerful defense against new attacks. After such a disease, a person acquires a stable immunity to this typirus for many years.
And everything would be fine if the next year the attack was repeated by exactly the same viruses. But they tend to mutate very quickly, forming new strains. Each time there is a so-called antigenic drift, and a new type of virus easily bypasses the immune barriers.
True, while mutations are insignificant, this form of the virus cannot cause serious epidemics and pandemics. But sometimes, once every 20-40 years, out of nowhere the virus dumps so terrible that everything starts to hurt them. And some even die, because this virus weakens the body so much that a person dies from all sorts of complications.
As we have already said, doctors knocked off their feet, trying to find that den in which influenza viruses sit for decades, passing through numerous mutations, giving rise to all new, sometimes very terrible strains. Virologists have examined all corners of the earth, but all in vain.
"Looking not there!" - said back in the 70s of the last century, people quite far from medicine, namely the British astrobiologists Chandra Wickramasingh and his teacher Fred Hoyle. They hypothesized that viruses are alien inhabitants. They come to Earth from the tails of passing comets. It is not for nothing that many peoples have a belief: if you saw a comet, expect trouble.
Uninvited passengers also parachute to the Earth's surface with cosmic dust and many small meteorites that bombard us every moment.
Physicians at first did not believe astrobiologists, but they soon presented evidence. On meteorites, they began to search and find the remains of biomaterials - bacteria and viruses. In addition, Wikramasinghu and his colleagues recently discovered a large number of viable, highly developed microorganisms in air samples taken at an altitude of about 40 kilometers. According to Wikramasingh's estimates, up to 20,000 bacteria and even more viruses fall to the Earth from interplanetary space every day for every square meter. Moreover, most of these microbes are similar to terrestrial microorganisms.
“The ingress of advanced microorganisms with a clear resemblance to terrestrial bacteria increases the likelihood that pathogenic bacteria and viruses can also enter the Earth from space. The annals of medical history describe many outbreaks of deadly epidemics, the causes of which, as can be assumed, based on the data obtained, were microorganisms brought from outer space,”write Wickramasingh and his associates.
It is to "space" epidemics that scientists now refer to the plague in Athens, the strange influenza pandemic of 1917-1919 and some later pandemics.
Wickramasingh recalls that in the winter of 1918, there was a sudden outbreak of the disease in remote areas of Alaska, whose inhabitants had no contact with the outside world for several months. They tried to explain this event by the appearance of some particularly infectious microorganism that can simultaneously infect a large number of people at once, and thereby lead to several outbreaks of the disease in different places. However, the version of the "vertical" convergence of the pathogen was not even considered then.
In relatively recent times, an outbreak of SARS (atypical pneumonia), according to Wickramasingh, also suggests an extraterrestrial origin of the virus. First, he has never met on Earth before (and that, by the way, also raises suspicions of his artificial origin). Secondly, since it first appeared in China, Wickramasingh suggests that the bulk of the virus hit the Earth's surface in the Himalayas, where the stratospheric layer is thinnest, and only then sporadically dropped out in nearby territories.
Vikramasingh also points out that air transport of the earthlings themselves also contributes to the massive spread of epidemics. After all, a person who falls ill at one end of the planet in a few hours may be on another continent, tens of thousands of kilometers from the take-off site, infecting hundreds or even thousands of people along the way, without suspecting it.
This is what an insidious adversary our virologists have to deal with, who for many decades have been unsuccessfully trying to develop a universal influenza vaccine. While they are constantly late, developing vaccines against a strain whose epidemic has already passed. But soon the situation, it seems, can be corrected.
We have already said that the modern mobility and overcrowding of humanity contributes to the rapid spread of epidemics. A person gets off the plane, travels by bus from the airport to the city, transfers to the subway and sneezes from time to time. This turns out to be enough that on the way he has already infected several hundred people who happened to be near him.
And then the epidemic develops like a chain reaction in an atomic boiler. Each of the newly infected, in turn, is capable of infecting at least dozens more people during the day. And in a few days everyone will talk about the epidemic as a fact.
This is just one of the possible scenarios for an epidemic outbreak, calculated at the Institute of Mathematical Modeling of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And at first, mathematicians had no intention of invading medicine. One of the tasks that they solved at the end of the last century was to calculate the trajectory of the landing spacecraft.
Mathematicians used in their work the so-called method of direct, statistical Monte Carlo modeling; it made it possible to operate with a huge amount of initial data. Today, to calculate the descent of a spacecraft, researchers can take into account the parameters of the motion of tens of millions of particles.
And then it suddenly turned out that these particles behave like people - the inhabitants of a multimillion-dollar metropolis; they also have their own trajectories of movement, touch each other, contribute to the processes taking place around them. Only in the city, instead of a descent spacecraft, an infection, for example, sneaks through the crowd.
However, at first, the researchers did not realize that they had in their hands an excellent tool for modeling the processes taking place in the human population. But they were asked by biologists to help analyze changes in the population of lemmings, which also suffer from various kinds of epidemic diseases. From here it was already one step to modeling the spread of epidemics among people.
And if earlier only differential equations were used to analyze such cases, then the new mathematical apparatus helped to make the analysis, and then the forecast much more accurate. Moreover, mathematicians would have achieved even more impressive success if the notorious secrecy did not interfere with them. So, in particular, practically all statistical data were kept secret in the USSR.
There are at least two reasons for this. First, our statisticians often work rather sloppy, and the data they collect are quite far from reality. The second reason is purely political: even approximate statistical data quite clearly showed the blunders of the socialist economic system. So, contrary to what the newspapers wrote, not one of the five-year plans of the USSR was fully implemented, and the famous seven-year plan, which promised that we all should live under communism a long time ago, also failed.
According to the director of the Research Institute of Influenza of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Academician Oleg Kiselev, the so-called competent authorities are diligently secreting medical indicators to this day. When the academician already in the current century needed data on influenza epidemics in the 50-60s of the last century, “we could not get any, even the most approximate figures.”
And now researchers are trying to break through the bureaucratic wall: they collect data through various channels, establish contacts with the leadership of railways and airlines in order to track the main traffic flows. This information will be invaluable if you need to simulate the movement of infection across the country in the event of a pandemic or terrorist attack. However, it seems that this problem is of concern only to scientists. But if a new virus nevertheless comes into the human population, it will be too late to calculate the consequences.
Meanwhile, overseas have long understood the benefits of pre-forecasting. The interdisciplinary state project MIDAS (Models of Infectious Diseases Agent Study) has been operating in the USA since 2002, created on the recommendation of the General National Advisory Council for Medical Sciences.
Mathematicians, together with representatives of other specialties, are working on scenarios of possible pandemics and bioterrorist attacks. The project involves two dozen of the largest American universities and research centers, and its findings are taken into account in the development of a national contingency plan.