Name: 西班牙流感：歷史的警示 (Spanish Flu: a warning from history)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T09:38:05.000Z
Duration: 11 min 3 s
Description: 【看影片學英語】數萬部 YouTube 影片，搭配英漢字典即點即查，輕鬆掌握單字發音與用法，長久累積看電影不必再看字幕。

Perhaps until recently, Spanish Flu has been what some people call

we're saying 50 to 100 million - far greater than the casualties of the

you know the carnage of the First World War is is graphic and horrendous but at

the same time this this unknown enemy is starting to sweep through the US, Europe,

the trenches and it is recorded by the Spanish press and it becomes dubbed as

the 'Spanish flu' because they are neutral.

they estimated that maybe 20 million had died. By the late 20th century that

figure it went up to 25 million. In the 21st century with scientists and

historians now getting together to work much more closely, that figure has now

been upped to fifty to a hundred million people killed.

people in the first 25 weeks than HIV/AIDS has killed in 25 years -

horrendous! Those mortality statistics are staggering.

We don't know exactly why some flu strains are much more severe than others and why some of

them would would be more likely to kill people or cause very severe disease.

What is particular about avian and pandemic viruses is that they replicate deep

inside our lungs. When our cells detect this they trigger

very strongly an immune response this leads to an influx of white blood cells

and fluids into our lungs and it restricts the amount of air space that

The symptoms are very graphic and very very striking so you

know it's said that some people drowned in their own phlegm, so if it was hitting

or effecting the lungs - people were spurting blood

from their ears and their noses. Descriptions of people turning blue or

purple so you know it was really really severe and people just dropping down in the streets

Those that succumbed to the flu were in the age group 20 to 40 years

which is very unusual for an influenza epidemic or pandemic and scientists and

historians are now still looking to see why.

died in 1918 they either died from the initial flu infection or they died from

a enormously strong immune response to that virus were their lungs just filled

up with fluids from trying to attack the virus that got into their lungs.

So traditionally everyone sort of said oh well it's the trenches you know the

conditions of the war and that's why it was so fatal but when you think well you

know how did it spread so rapidly around the world to places that are not part of

I think the traditional explanation is it starts in

Kansas in an army camp and then the troops bringing it over to the trenches,

Europe but there's still so many, many unknowns.

long been interested in the 1918 pandemic and one of the questions is to

try and disentangle how its spread around the world and exactly what the

routes have been. Given a perfect data you could work backwards and try to

Whereabouts does it arrive in a country, does it

arrive multiple times or thinking about multiple countries where is the first place?

If you understand the origin of a pandemic then you understanding about

where it's come from and maybe you can stop that in future.

Almost certainly it was a bird flu originally but then we also know that

that flu or something very similar to it was in pigs at the same time. Maybe it's

somebody who works very closely with birds or who works very closely with

pigs or has some other exposure like that.

One of the big really open questions in flu research and flu Public Health is -

How does the virus adapt from one species to another, how does for example

a virus in pigs or in Birds get into humans and then start transmitting?

Then the key question is - how does the virus then adapt within that person to stop

being a pig virus or a bird virus and become a human virus? in other words to

be able to transmit from human to human and it's probably some very quick

evolutionary process that is going on within that human and in many cases

won't be successful, but in a few cases we'll and that's when the virus can

start spreading between humans and become a flu pandemic and then stay in

Just as people were celebrating Armistice Day

and there was hope that it was dying down but then it resurged and a far more

So this the second wave really spread like

wildfire affecting a third or quarter of the population of the world and it was

short-lived so it petered out not long afterwards maybe in 1920/1921 but it was

What happened was is that virus continued to

transmit among humans, in fact it continued until 1957 to transmit between

humans and probably what happened there is that the virus adapted to humans.

It wasn't this avian or swine virus that came in and was accidentally more

In a lab here in Cambridge we study both seasonal flu and

pandemic flu from the standpoint of - how does the virus evolve? And how can we

predict that evolution and make vaccines to try to artificially evolve the virus

both in the laboratory and in the computer to understand what its gonna do

next and to make vaccines against those strains that will evolve in the future.

So this is the basic science of studying evolution

trying to predict that evolution. Something that's nobody has ever been

able to do for a complex organism. And then working to use that understanding

On the pandemic flu side we do a similar thing where we

look to see how that virus is changing - that virus how it changes in birds and

how it changes in birds and in other species and to try to see what

possible variants out there might be but there might be and again to make

vaccines that could protect against all of those variants that we see.

Flu is very difficult to eradicate because it's constantly mutating and changing its

genetic information. We work on the influenza virus and in particular on the

enzyme that copies the genetic information of the virus when this

enters our cells. Specifically we're interested in how this enzyme can do

this activity and how it inserts mutations in a viral genome that leads

to the formation of the new strains to which we need to develop new vaccines.