Free Outbreak! Plagues That Changed History by Bryn Barnard Page A

but unable to move.
    In Europe, during the postwar peace negotiations at Versailles, President Woodrow Wilson caught the flu. At the time he was the most popular leader in the world: American troops had provided the needed manpower to end the war. If anyone could have rammed through an agenda, it was Wilson. Indeed, he had come to the conference to push his Fourteen Points, a plan to prevent future Great Wars. But while Wilson was too sick and weak to have much influence, the other Allies forced unpayable reparations on Germany and gained territory for themselves. In the end, the Versailles treaty was not the blueprint for a better world that Wilson had hoped for. It was “legal robbery,” a treatise on revenge. Worse, the United States Senate rejected Wilson’s greatest creation, a League of Nations to guarantee the peace. In the years between the wars, unemployment and hyperinflation so crippled Germany that people would listen to anyone with a plan, even the hate-filled fantasies of Adolf Hitler. World War II was virtually guaranteed.

Just the flu
    Influenza
is an Italian word meaning “influence.” The name may spring from the astrological idea that the stars and planets influence humanity, including human health. It is an ancient disease that probably first evolved in birds. Today the main reservoir of the virus resides in the flocks of wild waterfowl like ducks, geese, and gulls that spread it around the world as they migrate. They ingest the virus when they eat and excrete it in their feces. It doesn’t make them sick, suggesting a long relationship between parasite and host. Domestic birds like chickens, however, are not so well adapted to the virus. It kills them. Once one chicken is infected, the disease explodes through flocks, often with devastating effects. As the virus sickens the birds, their immune systems try to make antibodies to overwhelm it. Under this kind of pressure, flu viruses are unstable. Each generation is slightly different from the last. This helps the virus outmaneuver the immune systems of some hosts, which can cause a local epi-demic. Every few decades, a flu virus may morph into a form to which nearly all hosts are susceptible. This causes a global pandemic. Such was the case with Spanish influenza.

     
    The influenza virus
     
    How did the flu virus start infecting us? People living in close proximity to animals have given many pathogens an opportunity to switch hosts. At some point in the past, the influenza virus jumped from birds to people, either directly or via an intermediate host. Pigs are the most probable “mixing vessel,” an animal susceptible to avian viruses whose internal environment pressures the unstable flu parasite to change just enough to be able to infect us, too. One of the places where people, domestic birds, and pigs live in close proximity is rural China. It is no surprise that most of the major flu pandemics have started there. Even the 1918 Spanish flu may have had a Chinese origin: thousands of Chinese laborers were imported to Europe during World War I to dig trenches and could have carried the disease with them.
    After the Spanish influenza subsided, a worldwide flu surveillance network was developed to try to head off another pandemic. Scientists in the network now monitor the nature of yearly flu outbreaks and provide this information to pharmaceutical companies so that they can develop effective vaccines. Particular attention is paid to China and Southeast Asia. Several deadly flu epidemics have been controlled this way, including the 1957 Asian flu and the 1968 Hong Kong flu. The 1991 Hong Kong bird flu and the 2004 Asian bird flu, both of which jumped to people, were stopped by slaughtering chicken flocks that might harbor the disease. Nineteen million birds were killed in Canada’s Fraser Valley alone in 2004. Since 2001, the UnitedStates Centers for Disease Control has stepped up flu surveillance with the establishment of the International