The Great Pandemic: Spanish flu timeline (Biological & Biomedical Sciences Essay)

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The Great Pandemic
Spanish flu timeline
The Spanish flu, is regarded as the deadliest pandemic in the 20th Century. Its origin is unknown, but the first cases in the United States of people who had flu-like symptoms were reported in March 1918 at a military camp called Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas. It is estimated that the flu lasted for one year and ended around April 1919 (Centres for Diseases Control and Prevention). It is termed as one of the deadliest pandemics in recent history because the Spanish flu killed around 50 million people worldwide, with 675,000 deaths recorded in the United States alone. More than 500 million people, a third of the world's population at the time, were affected by the flu (Centres for Disease Control Prevention). World War I was the primary mode by which the Spanish flu was spread. Most soldiers from different countries involved in the war were recruited from their respective countries to fight in other countries, especially in Europe, where the war was mostly staged. Soldiers from some countries already had the Spanish flu before going to war, and therefore once they were recruited, they went and spread it to others who were of different countries, and thus the flu spread all over the world.
The virus associated with the Spanish flu is known as the H1N1 influenza A virus with genes of Asian origin. It is a negative-strand RNA virus. It is mostly found in swine and is known to mutate with time. Among influenza-causing viruses globally, only H1, H2, and H3 are known to affect human beings. The H1N1 virus has caused three out of the six pandemics recorded in world history. Influenza A viruses are negative-strand RNA viruses with a genome consisting of eight RNA segments encoding up to 11 viral proteins. These viruses exhibit significant genetic variation, both by point mutations and by reassorting their eight RNA segments between different isolates within the same type. This genetic variation happens by coinfection in vitro or in vi...