Kolata, Gina - Flu

[oyceter]

Subtitle: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It

I should have written this up sooner, since now I have forgotten many of the details. While Kolata does summarize the 1918 influenza pandemic, most of the book is on the aftermath, from how scientists figured out that a virus was responsible to actually trying to find a sample of the virus and figuring out why it was so virulent.

My big question after finishing Barry's The Great Influenza was how scientists eventually figured out that the influenza was caused by a virus and not by a bacteria. Kolata goes a little into this, but I don't actually remember exactly how people came to the conclusion. I believe it was less a single moment and more lots and lots of experiments that gradually ended up ruling out a bacteria? I also found it kind of hilarious that Kolata gives Barry's favorite scientists one or two lines and then skips over them entirely.

Most of the book is spent on how two different teams of people went looking for samples of the 1918 virus. The U.S. Army had actually preserved several bits of lung sample, but the big discovery was finding the still-frozen body of an Inuit woman in Alaska. I found Kolata's write up of the team that didn't succeed a bit odd, particularly her description of the woman in charge, Kirsty Duncan. There are just a few weird mentions of how attractive Duncan was to the men on the team, and one of the team member's daughters basically accuses her father and Duncan of having an emotional affair.

Also, although the successful team did end up getting the full genetic sequence of the virus, the book makes it sound like everyone is still puzzled as to why the 1918 virus was so deadly. When I finished the book, I felt as though Kolata had written the book too early, although of course one doesn't know if a major scientific discovery is going to be made or not.

I did end up finding an article on the reconstruction of the 1918 virus at the CDC, which was apparently in 2005. They did several experiments, and it seems as though the combination of several things all worked together to make the virus so virulent. My main question is if Kolata had written the book prior to this, and then published it in 2011, and if so, why it wasn't updated. It seems like this would have been good information to have in the book!

- rachelmanija, Ch. 1-2
- rachelmanija, Ch. 3-6

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I think I'm not going to write up the end of this book, since I agree with you on literally everything, all the way down to forgetting a lot due to not writing it up soon enough, the random mention of the possible emotional affair, and the hilarious dismissal of William Welch and Barry's other Great White Male crushes.

Duncan aside, it was nice to see so many women in this book.

I will go read that article now.

[oyceter]

Haha, I feel that makes sense, especially since I didn't write up the entire part on the swine flu vaccine because you had covered it so well!

[kore]

That is a really neat article! altho it does inspire that OH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU GUYS DOING feeling in me. Let's recreate the deadliest influenza virus ever, sure!

I found this article which seems to give a pretty good history of how good old Pfeiffer's claim that it was caused by B. influenzae was slowly disproven over decades: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2391305/ It looks like you are right and it was more a series of related discoveries by different people, culminating in 1933, when Alphonse Raymond Dochez, working with a British group, did those experiments with chicks and ferrets that I am too tired to understand right now. But it was over a span of 15-20 years! and across international borders. Andrewes, Smith and Laidlaw seem to mostly get the credit, altho it's obviously the culmination of the work of dozens and dozens of people. I don't remember if Shope and Dochez et al are mentioned in Barry's book because I honestly tried to forget as much of that as I could. So Pfeiffer was WRONG, WRONG, WRONG-O in his clinging to the bacillus theory. The same thing happened with yellow fever and the discovery of that virus IIRC. Which is just pretty much how science works -- wrong theories carefully disproven until years and years later someone arrives at the truth -- which I think is what Barry was kind of trying to get at, only he did so in a really unclear and aggravating way.

-- And all that was just for the A strain, too; I think the B strain virus wasn't found until the late fifties.

[oyceter]

Ooo thank you for the link, that looks really interesting!

[meara]

Oh man, reading that article was scary and also made me want to facepalm. Because they’re so confident that if another pandemic happened we are so much more prepared! Sadly, while it’s true we now have better medical capabilities than in 1918, the rest doesn’t seem much better (other than thankfully Covid doesn’t have the same mortality rate) “ In terms of national, state and local pandemic planning, no coordinated pandemic plans existed in 1918. Some cities managed to implement community mitigation measures, such as closing schools, banning public gatherings, and issuing isolation or quarantine orders, but the federal government had no centralized role in helping to plan or initiate these interventions during the 1918 pandemic”

[bibliofile]

> In terms of national, state and local pandemic planning, no coordinated pandemic plans existed in 1918.

Oh geez, that's too painfully familiar right now.

[oyceter]

Ahahahahah LOLSOB. I keep reading things about "what with the Next Big One be? Are we prepared?!?!" in the books I'm reading for pandemic book club, and all I can do is laugh hollowly.

[oracne]

I found my copy of this! But have no desire to re-read right now.

[oyceter]

I do not blame you! I realize my coping mechanism of reading as much about pandemics as possible is pretty atypical, haha.