Mr Tony Sweeney, The Flu Pandemic of !918.

Lecture given 12th January 2015

This was said to be the greatest catastrophe in medical history since the Black Death. World wide over 10 million died and more people died in the UK and Germany than were killed by the fighting in WW1, one person in three caught the disease in the UK and one in ten succumbed. Mr Sweeney recounted that he could remember his mother telling him that in 1918 her mother had four coffins in her house.

Very little information was published in the press and from Govt sources to prevent a panic both at home and in the Trenches. The recorded deaths from the virus were said to be 53 in St Helens in 1918/1919 which was an understatement, the disease was commonly called Spanish Flu and it effected mainly young to middle age people but not the very young or the elderly.

The virus could only be seen via an electron microscope which was described as a fatty substance with surface protein appendages it was given the name H1 M1 it was described as having a simple genetic configuration which attaches itself to human RNA.  It had the ability to mutate frequently particularly  in domestic poultry. In 1992 12 million poultry were destroyed in Hong Kong alone.

In order to study the genetic make up of the disease bodies were recovered from the permafrost and that continues today.

Mr Sweeney referred to Ebola disease today and probable similarities with H1 N1 there was an outbreak of H1N1 in Mexico recently but it did not become a pandemic. Flu injections we receive today change annually to cope with the genetic variation of the virus.

Report by Michael Rogers.