Flu Viral Infection

Influenza viruses have special features that can over power a body’s immune system. It affects respiratory tract – nose, throat, bronchial tubes and lungs.

First, influenza virus are efficient travelers.

Second, they have an amazing ability to copy themselves.

And third, flu viruses are unique in that once a strain has spread in a population, its structure changes and it then is capable of causing a new form of flu because the antibodies produces to combat the original virus are not effective against the new form.

An entirely new strain appears about every 10 years.

Not only do influenza viruses travel easily from person to person, they do so secretly for part of the time.

A person with the flu may be contagious for several days before he or she know it.

When an infected person coughs or sneezes, he or she releases tiny droplets of water from the mouth and nose.

The most common way to catch the flu is by inhaling that tiny droplets. Less often it is spread when the person touch a surface such as a faucet handle or phone that has the virus on it and then touch his own mouth, nose, or eyes.

The virus’s ability to turn normal human or animal host cells into flu-copying machines is another reason influenza can take over immune systems.

After an incubation period of 1 to 4 days, people infected with influenza virus develop an abrupt fever, headache, sore throat and dry cough that can in some cases progress to viral pneumonia, respiratory failure and death.
Flu Viral Infection

History of Influenza

History of Influenza
Hippocrates recorded an epidemic of a flu-like infection in 412 B.C that wiped out the Athenian army.

The sixteenth century saw two flu pandemics that spread throughout Europe. The first, in 1510, infected nearly the entire population of Europe, but claimed few lives.

The second, in 1580, devastated cities and spread through the whole of Western Europe. The city of Rome, for example, had 9,000 fatalities.

At least pandemics of flu spread throughout Europe in the seventeenth century. In the past of 200 years eight great flu pandemics seized the world prior to the devastation wrought by the 1918 flu.

During a period of fourteen months beginning in the spring of 1918, half of the entire world’s population was infected with the influenza virus and nearly 41 million people died.

Every country in the world was affected, no matter how remote, and this occurred in an era before air travel and a global community existed.

Victims who died during the 1918 flu were typically healthy young adults. Among the 20 to 40 year old age group, the fatality rate from the 1918 flu was 50 percent.

The virus of 1918 was so effective at killing its host that within a short period of time it rendered itself extinct, people either immune to the virus or dead.

Since that time several other lesser pandemics have occurred across the globe, but health officials anxiously await the next deadly flu pandemic, which they predict as inevitable.

When it occurs, experts foresee millions of death, hospitals quickly flooded with cases of pneumonia, and every health care system in the world over whelmed by the volume of flu victims.
History of Influenza