Week 4 — Has anyone ever named an influenza epidemic correctly?
Amelia S -
Hi guys! Welcome back to week 4 of my blog!!!
It’s been a pretty slow week for research, but I did have Science Olympiad states last weekend – which of course includes the event (disease detectives) that sparked my interest in this subject. BASIS won on Saturday which means we’ll be going to the national tournament in May at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln!
In my internship, I’ve been trying to look at the data as a function of individual years rather than birth cohorts to see if that improves accuracy to mixed results. There’s too much data for a nice small confusion matrix but below is a table of reference age compared to predicted age (Fig. 1). The goal would be for everything to be perfectly on the diagonal, but as you can see it is still mostly accurate, which is a good sign!
Otherwise, I’m going to give a quick overview of a pandemic I researched this week: 1977 Russian Flu. Just like Spanish Flu, this flu pandemic was also misnamed – the first cases were actually in China. This epidemic was nowhere near 1918 levels of mortality, but it is really interesting from a public health perspective and it’s a bit of a mystery from a genetic standpoint. A paper I read called 1977 a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in that its origins can be traced back to a pandemic that never was the year before.
In 1976, there were a handful of cases and one death from Swine Flu at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Top public health officials were convinced that it was a sign that another flu epidemic like 1918 was on the horizon and launched a huge national vaccine program to fight it. However, this epidemic never materialized, and everyone involved looked like a fool for raising the alarm over nothing. The Fort Dix strain fizzled out after a few weeks — not fit enough to survive beyond the perfect conditions of an overcrowded military base.
The Fort Dix strain of H1N1 never made it big, however, there was a H1N1 epidemic soon after, and a very odd one at that. In 1977 the flu emerged in China, spreading to Russia where it got its name. The so-called “Russian Flu” killed approximately 700,000 people over the ensuing years – though older people seemed to be nearly immune to it and when it was sequenced it was practically identical to flu strains from 20 years earlier. Flu evolves very quickly – that’s why there’s a new vaccine every year – so it’s really unlikely that the virus just stayed the same for two decades. This has led people to believe that Russian Flu was not an organic epidemic, but caused by a lab accident that released a decades old flu strain back into a susceptible population.
There isn’t much physical evidence that the Russian Flu epidemic was linked to the H1N1 scare the year before, but because of the timing and genetic similarity to earlier strains, some experts believe that it was the result of vaccine trials in response to the outbreak in New Jersey: the extinct H1N1 virus from the 1950s was unfrozen in a lab to test a Swine Flu vaccine and escaped into the general population. It’s not an unrealistic explanation, and goes to show how important an accurate public health response is — in this case people overreacted so badly they created the pandemic themselves.
Thanks for tuning in, see you next week!
- Burke, Donald S., and Amy Schleunes. 2024. “A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Pandemic: The 1977 ‘Russian Flu.’”Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 67 (3): 386–405. https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2024.a936217.
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Kolata, Gina. 2001. Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It. Simon and Schuster.
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