Influenza Infection
The flu, like many other infections, tends to make some people sicker than others. Those who are most vulnerable include the very young, the very old, people with heart and lung problems, and those with impaired immune systems. For most healthy people, having the flu is still a miserable experience, but at least it is not life threatening.
Symptoms of the flu usually start suddenly, with characteristic high fever, aches and pains, sore throat, red eyes, and general fatigue. It simply sucks the energy out of your body. These symptoms usually improve after three to four days, and a nasty cough starts later in the course. The cough can last for more than two weeks.
For those less fortunate, complications from the flu infection can result in pneumonia, sinus infection, infection of the brain, and even death. These serious problems are not common in young adults, but even healthy individuals are not entirely immune to these complications. During the flu pandemic of 1918, 40 million people died, including many healthy adults.
Alert
In the flu season that ended in 2008, 72 children died from the flu. The season ended in May 2008.
You may have heard about the flu pandemic in the news, especially the swine flu pandemic in early 2009. A global pandemic occurs when the flu virus changes itself so much that it is almost transformed to an entirely new virus. The danger of this transformation is twofold.
For one, the new flu virus becomes so different that very few people's immune systems are prepared to fight off such an infection. Typically, if you got sick from the flu in past years, your body is going to be somewhat immune to the flu in the future. That's because the different strains of flu virus still share some similarities, so a small degree of immunity persists after each infection.
However, when the flu virus mutates drastically, it becomes an entirely new beast. Your immune system cannot recognize the mutant virus at all, so you are completely vulnerable to the infection. This is also true for everyone else in the world. This is only one of the reasons why a flu pandemic is so deadly. The virus is a new evil that no one has ever seen before. By the time the human immune system detects the new virus, it is often too late.
Another reason why a mutated virus is dangerous is that the new flu may be more aggressive and cause more life-threatening problems than the typical flu virus. The 1918 flu was characterized by massive bleeding from internal organs and a high rate of complication due to bacterial pneumonia. The virus was so virulent that even healthy adults perished from the flu.
It is impossible to predict when the next global flu pandemic may occur. The mutant flu virus frequently originates from an existing flu virus that affects primarily animals. You probably heard of the bird flu and more recently the swine flu. Bird flu hasn't reached pandemic status, but swine flu was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in June 2009.
Essential
Other types of the flu virus that affect animals can occasionally make humans sick. You may have heard of the bird flu (or avian flu), the swine flu, and the canine flu virus. These viruses usually do not infect humans, but when they do, they are capable of causing a massive worldwide outbreak that can kill millions of people.
Symptoms of the Flu
Symptoms of the flu include:
Fever (usually high)
Muscle and joint aches
Weakness and extreme tiredness
Flushed skin
Watery eyes
Headache
Cough
Sore throat
Runny nose
Nasal congestion
Loss of appetite
Chills
The following is the story of a real family during the 1918 flu pandemic. It is reproduced with permission from the CDC's Pandemic Flu Storybook (2008).
Storyteller: Debbie Crane
Location: North Carolina
When I was just learning to read, I prided myself on reading anything that presented itself. It was on a late spring day in 1966 when I found myself reading the tombstones in a small mountainside cemetery in western North Carolina. I had gone to the cemetery with my mother, Jessie Crane, and my grandmother, Edna Breedlove Clampitt. I remember scampering up to my mother and asking her why several of the tombstones seemed to have the same date of death. She told me to ask my grandmother that question. I did, and my grandmother told me the story of her family and the flu that swept across the country almost a half century before our journey to the cemetery.
In the late fall of 1918, Edna and her family (her pregnant mother, dad, and five siblings) were living in a cabin in Swain County, North Carolina. Even today, Swain County is pretty much disconnected from the rest of the world. It is a long two-hour drive from Asheville, North Carolina. In 1918, it was even more disconnected. No one there had heard about the flu. They pretty much lived their own lives farming, raising families, and “praising the Lord.”
One of my grandmother's brothers, Wade Breedlove, had joined the army. The family was thrilled when he came home for a visit in November. They “put the big pot in the little pot” for his visit, which means that they cooked special meals and everyone came to visit. No one knew that their brother had brought an untimely death to visit. He became ill shortly after he returned to base, but he survived.
The rest of the family wasn't so lucky. By mid-December, the whole family was terribly ill. They ached. Their throats hurt. They coughed and coughed. My great-grandmother, Ida Mae Breedlove, gave birth even as she lay sick. My grandmother described one terrible night when the whole family sounded as if they were all drowning. In the morning, Ida and two-year old Woodrow were dead. The newborn, named Paul, died days later. My grandmother was never sure if it was the flu that killed him, or if he simply starved to death in a household where everyone was just too weak to take care of him.
Eventually, the rest of the family got better and moved on as best as they could without the strong mountain woman who had been their center. Until the day she died, at age 93, my Grandma Clampitt never remembered being this ill again. She was a woman of deep personal faith who recalled a moment near Christmas that year when she thought she saw an angel. That moment gave her the will to go on.
