The “Spanish lady” and her deadly kisses turns 100

With the recent serious instances of swine flu in Limpopo, people are wondering if flu is more dangerous than it has generally been credited with.

In Louis Trichardt, many have remarked on the particularly biting coldness of this winter and people have been concerned about the sheer number of residents in this community who have succumbed to this season’s particularly nasty flu outbreak.

This year marks a century since the outbreak of the Spanish influenza that killed 7.48% of the population in the Zoutpansberg district alone – a total of 1 028 lives lost here during the 1918 outbreak. A drop in the ocean of the millions of people worldwide (estimates vary, but none are less than 50 million) who literally lost their lives within a matter of weeks from the arrival of the virus to the end of the outbreak. The 1 028 dead souls constituted a significant local loss, considering that the total population in the Zoutpansberg at that time numbered 137 412.

Historian and expert on the Spanish flu in South Africa Mr Howard Philips stated that it first started at Durban harbour and proceeded from there to travel to the rest of the population within two weeks. The second wave of infection stemmed from two ships docked in Cape Town, the Jaroslav and the Veronej, and sped into the heartland of the nation from those sources.

One particularly sad death was that of WP van Breda, a member of the Louis Trichardt chapter of the Masonic Lodge – The Lion of the North as the Louis Trichardt lodge was called. What made this even more tragic was that this young man, aged 22, passed away on the eve of the day that he was to be married. Many such tragedies occurred around the globe during the weeks that the “Spanish Lady” distributed her deadly “kisses”, but such a tragedy having occurred right here in Louis Trichardt brings the incident of the greatest pandemic in history into perspective in terms of the ease with which a virus can spread.

Referring once again to the 1918 Lion of the North Masonic Lodge records, they note that, after having ordered some ceremonial candles from their usual Cape Town suppliers, a reply was received on 18 October 1918 that said, “the candles cannot be supplied just now owing to the business being temporally closed on account of this influenza”. The lodge minutes reveal that “the influenza travelled the almost 2 000 kilometres from Cape Town to Louis Trichardt at about the same speed as the letter”. The first World War was just coming to an end when the flu hit, and poverty, lack, and unsavoury living arrangements exacerbated its quick spread.

As has happened with more recent variants of the H1N1 virus, more than one hypothesis on the origin and spread of Spanish Flu was put forward after the outbreak had subsided, but some of the facts have correlations to scenarios that can develop and provide perfect conditions to magnify the deadliness of virus outbreaks. In 1999, virologist John Oxford identified the major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France, as being the source. The overcrowded nature of this medical camp, together with the fact that it had not only a live piggery on the spot but a brisk ongoing trade in poultry, led Oxford to posit the ingredients for the perfect creation of such a mega-virus. Typical of H1N1 progression, he stated, it started with a mild virus harboured in avians, mutated in pigs, and was then transported by and to humans.

Another similarity between the Spanish Flu of 1918 and current H1N1 instances is that rather than affecting the very young, elderly or otherwise infirm individuals that you would expect to be more at risk, they both attack healthy young adult individuals and run their course to death with great speed. The virus was no respecter of persons, and the wealthy died just as quickly and surely as did the poor, including Francisco de Paula Rodrigues Alves, who was the President of Brazil at that time.

Dr Jonathan Quick, Chair of the Global Health Council, says: “The big one is coming – a global virus pandemic that could kill 33 million victims in its first 200 days. Within the ensuing two years, more than 300 million people could perish worldwide. At the extreme, with disrupted supply of food and medicines and without enough survivors to run computer or energy systems, the global economy would collapse. Starvation and looting could lay waste to parts of the world”. Dr Quick says that the next big influenza epidemic could literally happen right now, and that it is merely a question of time before a “new and unprecedentedly deadly mutation of the influenza virus” strikes. Quick adds that humanity’s requirement of vast quantities of cheap meat, particularly chicken and pork, has provided perfect breeding grounds for developing a new super, deadly flu with the factory farming systems currently used to supply these billions of tons of meat. People’s lifestyles will then ensure a quick spreading of the virus.

An alert that has been issued by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to scientists and medical staff around the globe might make people think twice about dismissing their annual sniffles as no big deal. The WHO states that they should be on alert for a new (as-yet-undiscovered), potentially lethal infectious pathogen (virus or bacterium) which has been called Disease X. They say that Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.

Evidence points to the fact that Spanish Flu was an animal virus that mutated and transferred to humans as a result of a series of specific unforeseen events. John-Arne Rottingen (WHO advisor) states that “History tells us that it is likely that the next big outbreak will be something we have not seen before”, and that “we must prepare and plan flexibly in terms of vaccines and diagnostic tests”.

While the Spanish Flu seems like a past point in history, the truth is that it was the first incidence of the H1N1 virus, which is very much present in the world today. It ran its course in 1918, with its most virulent strains killing off hosts, and humans building antibodies to milder strains, but in the 100 years since its arrival, Spanish Flu has merely morphed – into Swine Flu. It has not left or been cured.

An in-depth study from the US National Library of Medicine, entitled “Origin of the 1918 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus as studied by codon usage patterns and phylogenetic analysis” by the RNA (Ribonucleic Acid Research society) stated that a certain swine H1N1 virus had crossed the species barrier from pigs to humans shortly before the pandemic of 1918. “This original swine virus might have been of low pathogenicity, causing no severe symptoms and was therefore undetected at that time; however, it may have served as a precursor for the classical swine H1N1 virus lineage. According to our study, the 1918 virus is rather of swine virus origin. The important new finding is that the signature of the PB1 gene of the 1918 virus is identical to that of the classical swine and human H1N1 viruses. In summary, our data supports the idea that the 1918 Spanish flu influenza virus was derived from a swine virus that itself might be a descendent of a distinct avian H1N1 virus. What we can say for sure is that the 1918 H1N1 virus is not related to one of the known avian influenza strains, except the clade 1 viruses,” the study stated.

News - Date: 12 August 2018

Jo Robinson

Jo joined the Zoutpansberger and Limpopo Mirror in 2018 pursuing a career in journalism after many years of writing fiction and non-fiction for other sectors.

Email: [email protected]