Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

by Dr Jeremy Brown

Because it was given in highly toxic doses, it may have been the aspirin that killed so many during the pandemic, and not the influenza itself. This is an unsettling thought, but it might help explain the deaths of a disproportionate number of otherwise healthy young adults—the very population that today rarely suffers from serious flu infections.

Bark again. Quinine comes from the cinchona tree, found in South America. There it was used by the indigenous peoples to treat malaria, and by the middle of the seventeenth century it was imported into Europe, where it became known as Jesuits’ powder (named for the religious order that brought it to Italy).

One of the hardest things to do in the treatment of a serious, self-limited, infectious disease is to refrain from prescribing drugs merely because the diagnosis has been made. The self-restraint of the level-headed physician is likely to be swept aside by the thought of the possible grave consequences of the malady, and his accustomed good judgment is apt to be smothered in the semihysterical atmosphere of alarm that pervades the community during the visitations of the epidemic. He forgets that a large proportion of patients with influenza do not need a single dose of medicine. There should be no routine treatment according to which certain drugs are given at stated periods, whether or not there is a clear indication for their use. The treatment is really expectant, symptomatic and individualistic.

If it doesn’t kill you immediately, carbon monoxide poisoning will cause symptoms that mimic the flu. Since flu outbreaks peak in the fall and winter—the very period in which people are running their heaters and furnaces—carbon monoxide exposure is often misdiagnosed as the

A virus is a box of chemicals, without the structures of a basic cell. It cannot metabolize or replicate on its own. In order to reproduce, it must invade living cells. Viruses infect bacteria and plants, reptiles, fish, birds, and mammals. They have been so intertwined with our own evolution that over millennia some became incorporated into our own genetic code.

There are a lot of viruses out there to make you sick. There is the rhinovirus, which causes the common cold, and the family of rotaviruses, which cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. There is the adenovirus, which causes conjunctivitis, coughs, a runny nose, and body aches. The human respiratory syncytial virus usually infects young children, giving them a fever, a nasty cough, and a runny nose. But none of these is the influenza virus, which is the only one we want to track. Without a test, your primary care physician cannot tell you which is causing your symptoms.

The relationship between mental health and the moon made its way into our language long ago. The word lunatic is derived from the Latin lunaticus, meaning “struck by the moon.”

Over time Tamiflu succeeded in one respect: it made some types of flu resistant to it. In Europe at least 14 percent of the circulating influenza viruses were resistant to Tamiflu by 2008. In short, the drug worked only to strengthen the virus that it claimed to combat.

Compared with other western countries, we do more invasive studies of the heart for patients with chest pain, without actually improving their outcomes. We put more of our patients into the intensive care unit, even though they are, on average, less sick than their counterparts abroad. We give more chemotherapy to cancer patients near the ends of their disease, even though it improves neither the quality nor the length of their lives. We do these things because we can, because to do otherwise would be considered giving up—even if doing less would be an extremely sensible and kind decision.

“The business is based on the razor-and-blade model,” explained one of the founders. “We don’t plan on making a profit on the razor.”