The History Of Flu

The flu is one of the oldest diseases known to mankind, as we can trace back its symptoms in writings dating as early as the fifth century B.C. The first one to point out the symptoms of the flu (although he doesn’t name it “flu” per say) is Hippocrates, commonly regarded as the Father of Medicine. In his works called the “Hippocrates Corpus”, he describes the symptoms of the influenza virus for the first time, in approximately 412 B.C. Since then, the virus has kept some of these symptoms, but in the same time, it has lost others and developed new ones. Actually, that’s the hardest part about keeping track of the flu over time: the fact that it’s one of the fastest evolving viruses on the planet, with radical evolution steps from season to season.

Throughout time, the flu has been reported to produce pandemic outbursts, claiming millions of lives during recorded history. Signs of a milder pandemic took place in pre-medieval Athens but the first full pandemic was recorded in 1580. Since then, pandemics broke loose on a relatively predictable timer, with roughly 3-4 pandemics every century, each with its own mortality rate, depending on the power of the particular virus (in some pandemics, the virus spread more easily, but its effects were not as deadly as on other occasions).

Various methods have been used to prevent and treat the flu during the Dark Ages and medicine and science worked together in finding the causes of the malady. The family of viruses that produces the flu, the orthomyxoviridae, was discovered relatively late, in 1933, by the United Kingdom’s Research Council. At that time however, the biggest pandemic flu in history had already unleashed its fury over the World, during 1918 and 1920.

One of the first fully recorded pandemics was the 1889-1890 Russian Flu, however its death rate was not very high. The Russian Flu opened the eyes of international medicine and science, which doubled their efforts in finding cures and prevention methods in case of a new pandemic.

This new pandemic would fall in the worst of times, in 1918, right after the First World War ended. The World and Europe in particular were hit by a vicious combination of two strains of influenza viruses that triggered the deadliest pandemic known to mankind, the Spanish Flu. This particular flu caught the world unprepared and ruined after the World War, the poor life and hygiene conditions making it easier for the virus to spread. The virus behind the Spanish Flu, the H1N1 was an “antigenic shift”, or a combination of two different viral strains that combined, formed a newer, deadlier one. When the Spanish Flu ended in 1920, it already infected over 500 million people worldwide, of which at least 40 millions died. In comparison, the First World War “only” took approximately 15 million lives, of which roughly 9 million were military personnel.

Since then, the World has gone through several other flu pandemics, such as the Asian Flu in 1957-1958 (1.5 million deaths), the Hong Kong Flu in 1968-1969 (1 million deaths), the New Jersey “Swine” Flu in 1976 and as of lately, the Avian Flu that started in 1997, but has not yet reached the status of a pandemic.