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Thanks to the media, all of us are well informed about swine flu, its symptoms and dangers, but how many of us know that swine flu is not actually a newfound malady, but a pandemic that has been circulating around the world for nearly a century now. The swine flu that is currently dominating the world had quite a big past. Read on to know.
Swine influenza was first projected to be a disease related to human influenza during the 1918 flu pandemic, when pigs became sick at the same time as humans. The first identification of an influenza virus as a cause of disease in pigs occurred about ten years later, in 1930.
1976 saw a swine flu outbreak among military recruits. It lasted about one month, and then was gone. As many as 240 people were infected; one died. Naturaly, there was concern that a new H1N1 pandemic might return in the winter of 1976. There was hence a crash program to create a vaccine and vaccinate all Americans against swine flu.
In 1976, swine flu struck again, at an army base in New Jersey. Four soldiers were struck with pneumonia and one of them died before the virus disappeared again.
A new variant of the most common virus that circulates the pig population (H1N1) is believed to be responsible for the latest outbreak and the massive number of deaths around the world.
On February 6, 1976 an army recruit died and four of his fellow comrades were hospitalized. Two weeks later health officials announced that the cause of his death was a new strain of swine flu with was a variant of H1N1. During this time another strain (H3N2) was also uncovered in circulation in the US. To prevent another major pandemic like 1918, the then President Gerald Ford had every person in the U.S. become vaccinated against the disease.
In September 1988, a 32 year old pregnant lady by the name of Barbara Ann Wieners became ill after visiting the hog barn at a county fair in Wisconsin. She gave birth, and died eight days later. During the same time, about 20 more people were infected, but she was the only one to die from it.
In 1998 swine flu was found in pigs across four States in the US, and it spread across the country within a year.
In 1999, Canada saw a strain of H4N6 crossing the species barrier from birds to pigs, but was contained on a single farm.
This outbreak in 2009 is due to a new strain of subtype H1N1 which was not previously reported in pigs. It appears as if this outbreak was transmitted from humans to pigs and then back to us as, like it had happened in the 1918 pandemic.
That is the history of swine flu till date, and it is for us to wait and see how modern medicine is able to tackle it. |
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