So they are like the genes or they contain the genes of the virus and they could be compared to the chromosomes in an animal cell. What could you compare those 8 segments of RNA to? So a tenth of a million of a meter in diameter. That vesicle is about 100 nanometers in diameter. Influenza has 8 RNA segments inside that bag or vesicle. They have a lipid bi-layer membrane around them like our cell membranes, very similar construction. Some other viruses don’t have that, they have a so-called nucleocapsid, which is a protein shell with the RNA or DNA inside that. It belongs to the class of so-called enveloped viruses and that means it has a membrane around it. What kind of virus is influenza? What is it composed of? What does it look like? I think it was later also found out that this particular strain was not as infectious when it jumped from human to human so it was very infectious going from chicken to man but not between humans. That may have contributed to suppressing that pandemic. They actually sacrificed the whole chicken population in Hong Kong in that year. It appeared to be a very virulent strain so all the health organizations were very concerned that this might be the beginning of a new pandemic but they could catch it very early. That was transmitted from birds, actually chickens to humans. There was an incident in 1997 where a new strain called the H5 strain appeared in Hong Kong again. And try to figure out where to prevent a serious pandemic from happening again, or to catch them very early. The Center for Disease Control, for example in Atlanta, and many other national health organizations monitor that very closely, year by year. Is it cyclical? Is it every 20, 30 years that some of these really virulent strains take hold?Īs far as I know, it’s still not very well understood and it’s still more or less erratic. Then in 1968 or the next one and that was the last major pandemic and that is an H3 strain for H for hemagglutinin which is the major surface glycoprotein of these viruses. First, in the Spanish flu they were the number one variance and the Asian flu pandemic in 1957 it was number 2’s. And actually the H and N stand for the major surface glycoproteins. And then, I believe, in 1957 or around there, there was an Asian invasion of new strains they are called H2 N2. That was over a particular strain that we call H1 N1. So as we just said, in 1918 there was this large Spanish flu as there were many in previous centuries.
And it’s actually not so well understood, even today, what causes a particular strain to suddenly set off and be so vicious and so virulent compared to the others that are circulating the population all the time. Some of these viruses or strains of viruses appear to be particularly vicious and claim more and more or claim very large numbers of death. Your immune system fights it and eventually, you get healthy again. But with most flu infections, they are not deadly. It is very infectious, as everybody whoever got the flu knows, and most of us have had it. So what is it about the influenza virus, how can it do so much damage? I’ve even heard that some historians claim that maybe the Germans lost WWI because they lost so many soldiers to that Spanish flu in 1918, or at least that was a contributing factor to it. I think it’s believed that American soldiers in WWI actually brought it over to Europe and it became a large pandemic in Europe and from there it spread all over the world. In 1918 there was a so-called Spanish flu pandemic and suddenly many people died, about 20 to 40 million worldwide. This research opens possibilities to develop new classes of viral entry inhibitors, which would serve to prevent influenza infection.Ĭould you comment a little bit on the 1918 influenza epidemic and how devastating it was? Tamm is a professor of Biophysics at the University of Virginia where he is studying the structures and interactions of viral fusion proteins in lipid bilayers, mainly using the influenza surface protein, hemagglutinin (HA).
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