Presse Med
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The "Russian flu", which raged from 1889 to 1894, is considered as the first pandemic of the industrial era for which statistics have been collected. This planetary event started in Turkestan and hit the Russian Empire, before reaching all European countries, the United States of America, and the whole world. Contemporaries were surprised by its high contagiousness as evidenced by attack rates averaging 60% in urban populations, its rapid spread in successive waves circling the globe in a few months by rail and sea, and the tendency of the disease to relapse. ⋯ All of these viruses are of animal origin. Recently, phylogenetic studies have revealed the genetic proximity between a bovine coronavirus BCoV and the human virus HCoV-OC43, indicating that the latter emerged around 1890, at the time of the Russian flu, when an epizootic was raging among cattle throughout Europe. Could the current human virus be the attenuated remnant that appeared after the Russian flu in 1894? Was there a coronavirus pandemic before Covid-19 ?
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The plague epidemic of 1720-1722 had a profound effect on the history of the city of Marseille. A subject of numerous scientific studies and a source of inspiration for novels, one of the last great European epidemics is well-documented. ⋯ We have completed this historical approach by referring to the study of mass graves of plague victims and will show how the simultaneous reading of two types of archives (historical and biological) can provide better anthropological knowledge of epidemic phenomena. The perspectives of interdisciplinary approaches to past infectious diseases are numerous, notably with the contributions of paleomicrobiology and genomics, and are particularly relevant today's health context.
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In June 1981, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report" described the first cases of what was to be known as the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Two years later, the agent responsible for the disease, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), was identified. ⋯ Where does this virus come from, and why such an emergence in the late 20th century? These are the questions that it is now possible to answer in large part thanks to the numerous studies published over a little more than three decades. As with other emerging infectious diseases, initial cross-species transmission from an animal reservoir and subsequent favorable sociological factors associated with the evolution of human societies have led to the spread of a dramatic disease, for which no vaccine is presently available.
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The Spanish flu occurred at the end of the First world war, in disastrous epidemiological conditions on populations exhausted by four years of war. At that time, there were no vaccines, no antibiotics, no oxygen and no resuscitation. It was even thought that the infectious agent was a bacterium. ⋯ The high mortality in the 20-40 age group remains an enigma. Some experts point to reduced immune response in patients previously exposed to related viral hemagglutinins during the 1889 pandemic. In any event, even though it concerns a markedly different virus, the history of the Spanish flu sheds light on the difficulties of management during today's pandemic.