Posted on 08/17/2008 3:55:24 PM PDT by fightinJAG
SUNDAY, Aug. 17 (HealthDay News) -- People who lived through the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million worldwide are still producing antibodies to the virus 90 years later, researchers report.
"Most people have a notion that elderly people have very weak immunity or they have lost immunity," said lead researcher Dr. James E. Crowe Jr., a professor of pediatrics, microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University.
"This study shows that extremely elderly people have retained memory of being infected with the 1918 flu, even 90 years later," Crowe said.
This is the first evidence that shows that people developed significant immunity to the 1918 flu virus, Crowe said. "It's important to know that you can develop immunity to such a pandemic virus. That has implications for new pandemic viruses," he said.
The report is published in the Aug. 17 issue of Nature.
For the study, Crowe's team studied antibodies in the blood of 32 people in their 90s and 100s, born during or before 1915. They found that all 32 people had antibodies to the 1918 strain of flu virus. In fact, several of these people were still producing the antibodies to the virus.
(Excerpt) Read more at health.usnews.com ...
My grandfather passed away in the Pendemic of ‘18. My dad is 89 years old.
My maternal grandmother was born in 1901. She had the flu so bad, she was given last rites, but she pulled through and lived to be 93. Two of her sisters are still alive; one is 96 and another is 93. A third died last week at 98. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.
Natural selection (NOT “evolution”) at work here folks.
I often wonder if these instances we hear of of people getting diagnosed with cancers at young-ish ages isn't something new at all but something that always happened and without the technology and screening processes we just never knew that people often had and lived long periods of time with these slower growing cancers.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/casualties.htm
At least 618,000 Americans died in the Civil War, and some experts say the toll reached 700,000. The number that is most often quoted is 620,000.
At any rate, these casualties exceed the nation's loss in all its other wars, from the Revolution through Vietnam.
The Union armies had from 2,500,000 to 2,750,000 men. Their losses, by the best estimates: Battle deaths: 110,070 Disease, etc.: 250,152 Total 360,222
The Confederate strength, known less accurately because of missing records, was from 750,000 to 1,250,000. Its estimated losses: Battle deaths: 94,000 Disease, etc.: 164,000 Total 258,000
I’ve read half a dozen or so narratives about how it happened.
It was not at all unusual to wake up in the morning, and appear to be totally healthful and uninfected, and to be dead by nightfall.
Scary stuff. Seriously, Night of the Living Dead seriously scary stuff.
And of course the eggheads, in their determination to do something new and exciting no matter how dangerous, have thawed and resurrected the virus from corpses in far northern climes where they were frozen.
Thanks a lot, idjits!
My grandmother died in late October 1918 as a result of the Flu Pandemic, less than a month before WWI ended in Europe ... my father was five years old. My grandfather, a minister, remarried a few years later. The women he married had lost her husband at an early age ... they both had children from their respective marriages. They in turn had children of their own ... thus a family joke ... my kids and your kids ... are fighting with our kids.
It’s amazing what people had to go through but a few generations ago that we today do not. Thanks for sharing your story
I don’t know how they survive the digestive tract but I believe babies under two months of age acquire their mothers’ immunities. Whether they stay immune is another question and I am not a medical expert on it.
I wonder if that immunity can be passed on from parents who were adults in 1918, I’m 71 and have never had the flu.
You may be right. I come from a long line of survivors, almost all living into their nineties. The most frail was my grandmother who got breast cancer (but lived 30 more years) and had a massive heart attack (but lived another fifteen years beyond that). She died at age 93 right shortly after 9/11. That is the only cancer of which I am aware in both sides of the family. My dad is turning 80 years old tomorrow. My mom is a year behind him. Of their combined eight siblings, only one has passed on from a heart ailment. Maybe I just lucked out with good, hearty genes. Since I was born, I’ve been hospitalized only three times—each time for childbirth. I’ve not treated myself as well as I should but surely something is helping to sustain me.
Once your body learns how to develop an antibody, It remembers it forever.
The flu nearly wiped out my maternal grandfather’s family in rural North Dakota in December of 1918. My grandfather was 14 at the time. He & his sister were quite ill with the flu. His one-week old brother and his 5-yr-old brother both died of it the same night. His mother and another younger brother nearly died that same night, but somehow survived. My grandfather lived to be 96.
Not so for both the Civil war and the Spanish-American war which had far more deaths from sickness that battlefield injuries. I have read both that WWI was the first war with more combat deaths and the opposite. It may depend on if you count the influenza deaths which continued after the armistice. WWII was indisputably one with more combat deaths at least in the American armed forces.
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Thanks BBell. In Gina Kolata's book "Flu", she notes that survivors of an earlier devastating strain in the late 19th century were apparently immune to "the Spanish Lady". |
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wow!
I am immune to Scorpion stings.
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