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 Did we give pigs the swine flu? x
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Swine flu roots traced to Spanish flu
Pigs might have spread the current strain of influenza to humans, attracting worldwide attention, but new Canadian-led research suggests that we might have given pigs the flu in the first place, during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
01/05/2009 5:17:50 PM
CBC News
A group of Canadian and U.S. researchers, writing in the May issue of the Journal of Virology, say experimental testing of how pigs responded to the 1918 Spanish flu supports the theory that the virus was passed on from humans to pigs in 1918, during the Spanish flu pandemic.
Both the human influenza virus known as the Spanish flu and a swine respiratory disease occurred at roughly the same time. The first human cases of Spanish flu appeared in spring of 1918 while the first reports of the swine illness were in the fall of that year.
Some strains of swine flu, including the one that has emerged recently from Mexico, are known to belong to the same subtype - H1N1 - as the Spanish flu. But the classical swine flu virus (an H1N1 subtype of type A influenza virus) wasn't isolated from a pig until 1930, so the connection between the Spanish flu and swine flu hasn't been clear.
One of the reasons the two strains of the virus were not strongly connected was because they had dramatically different impacts.
The Spanish flu, first identified in May 1918 in Spain, was lethal, killing at least 21 million people worldwide. It also was known to induce a lethal infection in a host of other animals, including ferrets, mice and macaques, a primate found in Europe and Asia.
The swine flu that first appeared in 1918, on the other hand, did not have the same impact on pigs, causing only a mild respiratory illness, leaving some to suggest they were not closely related.
2009 Swine flu not as lethal as Spanish flu: U.S. officials
The most recent version of the swine flu also doesn't appear to share the Spanish flu's virulence, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC said Friday the new virus isn't as deadly, because it lacks the genes that made the 1918 pandemic strain so lethal. Continued...
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