Types Of Influenza Epidemic

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The source of Influenza comes from wild bird’s right around the 1900s and spread very quickly to other birds that died. Some of these wild birds were carriers of the Influenza virus who passed the virus through the air onto other animals such as chickens, and then passed it on to pigs who then passed it on to humans. The symptoms of the Flu are fever, coughing, sneezing, and severe pain of the body starting in the respiratory area which is highly contagious and is spread through the air from human to another causing a major epidemic. In 1918, the worse epidemic was the Spanish Flu that killed almost 50 million people worldwide. At the time, there were no effective vaccines to treat this killer flu virus or prevent it from spreading. This particular …show more content…
According to the National Environmental Health Association (2005), “The 15 types of hemagglutinin (H) protein and nine types of neuraminidase (N) protein form a large number of influenza viruses for which birds are the natural hosts” (p. 48). When the combinations change between H and N this produces the Flu strain which can be passed to farm animals like chickens and pigs that now can be passed to humans. When humans have no antibodies of a particular strain of Flu it can be easily passed from human to human through the air which is how epidemics usually …show more content…
The United States alone lost almost 400,000 people because the Influenza vaccine did not exist at that time. People had no way of fighting off the disease, and this particular virus aggressively attacked people’s lungs. When this epidemic first started doctors assumed it was something else, and was misdiagnosed because of the intense symptoms that people were having from the Spanish Flu. According to Saxena, Tripathi, and Rawat (2012), “These symptoms include haemorrhage from mucous membrane, especially from nose, stomach, and intestine. Bleeding from the ears and petechial haemorrhage in the skin were also observed” (p. 3266). The Spanish Flu was the worst epidemic the world has ever experienced, and researchers said, this particular Flu epidemic was worst then the plague because it killed 30 million more people than the plague did. Therefore, scientists and researchers are frantically trying to create a drug to fight Influenza in case of another outbreak like the Spanish Flu from occurring

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