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

Emerging Infections Program. In 2003, the group’s office in Thailand was among the first to alert the world to a pandemic of a novel flulike disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The pandemic was controlled, in part, by unprecedented cooperation among scientists around the world, which the flu network had made possible. That cooperation will be essential in the future. Knowledgeable scientists say that with the instability of the influenza virus, it is only a matter of time—not if, but when—until another lethal Spanish-style flu emerges. Officials at the World Heath Organization estimate that when that happens, up to a billion people around the world could fall ill. Without an effective response, they suggest, 180 million people could die. Unlike in 1918, however, we know this pandemic is coming. We can prepare for the worst.
    Possibly the most important outcome of the Spanish flu was its immunological aftermath: the discovery of penicillin. Flu wasn’t definitively understood to be a virus until 1933. Before that, many scientists agreed with eminent German biologist Richard Friedrich Johannes Pfeiffer that flu was caused by a bacterium. In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was trying to isolate that bacterium, known as Pfeiffer’s bacillus. While Fleming was on vacation, a spore from a neighboring lab contaminated one of his bacterial cultures with the rare mold
Penicillium notatum
. Fleming noticed that the mold released a poison that inhibited the growth of bacteria. He had stumbled across the world’s first antibiotic: a substance that could kill pathogenic bacteria. He called the substance “penicillin.”

     
    Alexander Fleming was searching for a bacterial cause of the Spanish flu when he discovered the first antibiotic. A stray spore of a mold,
Penicillium notatum,
floated onto one of his petri dishes that was already infected with a culture of staphylococcus bacteria. Fleming noted that the mold produced a substance that inhibited the growth of the bacteria. He called it “penicillin.”
     
    Fleming didn’t follow up on his discovery, but ten years later, two other British doctors, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, tried to find out if penicillin had medical potential. When World War II created a huge need for drugs to treat wounded soldiers, these experiments were accelerated. At the time, soldiers were losing limbs and dying from even tiny wounds that festered and progressed to gangrene. Penicillin, though useless against viruses, stopped many bacterial infections with near-miraculous power. Soldiers who would have died from infection in previous wars could now return to the battlefield, giving the Allies a significant advantage over their enemies. Penicillin production was transferred to the United States and ramped up a millionfold, from petri dishes and lab trays to huge brewery vats. The strain of
Penicillium
changed, too, from the low-yield fungus in Fleming’s petri dish to a more productive strain discovered on a moldy cantaloupe in Peoria, Illinois. (A mutated version of that species,
Penicillium chrysogenum,
is still used today.) By 1945, the United States was producing enough penicillin to treat a quarter million patients a month. The age of antibiotics had begun.

 

I wish I hadn’t said that
    “It is time to close the door on infectious disease.”
    When United States surgeon general William Stewart made that pronouncement in 1967, it seemed neither hubris nor naïveté. It was a bold declaration in an age when anything seemed possible. At the time, smallpox was well on the way to being eliminated. Polio could be cured. Tuberculosis was in decline. Malaria and yellow fever were controlled. Measles was disappearing. Sexually transmitted diseases could be squelched. With infection nearly bested, chronic diseases like cancer and heart ailments seemed to be the focus of the future.
    By century’s end, however, nearly all of those immunological gains had been reversed.