Thanks for your interesting reply.
I may be immune to the 1918 flu that killed my Dad’s Brother and made my Dad very sick, due to the DNA, my Dad passed on to me after he survived the 1918 flu.
In fact many of us may have viruses that were millions of years in the making in our DNA:
I have some ancestors, whom we can track down to the late 1600’s to early 1700’s, who lived past 80 to even 100. Often our women weren’t as lucky with multiple children, resulting in deaths during the births and up to a couple of years of bad health after giving birth and finally dying.
Those long living ancestors may have had virus DNA passed on, which enabled them to survive. The life span picked back up for those born years before the Civil war. Again, many lived into their 90’s or 100’s into the 1920/30’s.
Those born right before, during or shortly after the Civil war often had shorter life spans. Some of the men, who fought in the war ended up with what is now called PTSD.
This impacted them emotionally and economically. Most never made it past their late 50’s/early 60’s. Their wives often died young, in spite of having ancestors with longer life spans.
The women on both sides our families born about or shortly after WWI for the most part have outlived their husbands by at least a decade. We feel that the Great Depression had similar negative impacts more on our men of working ages as our civil war had on their male ancestors.
Both men and women in our families are now making it to 80 and 80/90 plus with fairly good health or with problems that good medicine/surgery and doctors are helping them/us to feel better and have more enjoyable life spans.
May you live to 110, my Aunt Blanch lived to 106. Michealangelo and his father both lived to 90 during a time when the Bubonic Plague wiped out half of Europe.