by Lance W. Christiansen D.O.

Created on: March 11, 2009

First of all, epidemics and pandemics have existed since humans have recorded written history. Sometime in the past, a certain nasty disease that affected individuals over a great area was termed a "plague", which means something akin to, "struck down". Then later, somehow, large epidemics and pandemics were termed influenza, even before viruses were known to exist. Influenza is derived from he Italian word that means, "influence" and so in the "olden days", if a sickness spread around a city, a country, or a great area it was due to the "influence of the Gods, or God", because in those days it was thought that the heavenly being (s) could be please or displeased by the members of a given society and if their chosen God (s) was/were not pleased, he/she would smite them down with a disease. So, first of all, influenza does not mean a disease of any certain sort. Likewise the word plague does not necessarily mean a certain disease. Now we are starting at zero in an effort to understand what caused the pandemic that spread around the world in 1918.

In recent years, something like the last ninety years, the disease that killed so many people around the world in 1917-1919, has been thought to be caused by a virus. Surprisingly, virus means "poison" in Latin. It developed that name, because early in the research into bacteria, investigators realized that after filtering bacteria out of fluid, at times something that could not be seen by microscopy, would be able to make a creature sick. It was called filterable poison and to make it keen they gave it the Latin name for poison, virus!

A Russian investigator first discovered plant virus, the tobacco mosaic virus. Then little by little more knowledge was gathered and the first virus that caused disease was determined to be the virus that caused yellow fever. Carroll, I believe who was amember of Walter Reed's group in Cuba, used the techniques developed by Robert Koch to assure that the "thing smaller than a bacteria" and that was filterable, could reproduce and cause diseases in animals. The prior determination was done just after the start of the 1900's. Research continued and more was learned, but it wasn't until the nineteen thirties that the electron microscope was invented and virion could be seen, but of course they were just small shadows and not much analyically could be managed.

In 1818, when the pandemic started, medical scientists could not determine what caused people to die so rapidly. Since they were quite

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