Economist, May 27, 2017 (I)

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(1) Disease in history l One Hundred Million Dead.
www.economist.com/news/books-and ... est-disease-history
(book review on Laura Spinney, Pale Rider; The Spanish flu of 1918 and how it changed the world. PublicAffairs, September 2017)

Note:
(a) "The word 'influenza' started being used towards the end of the Middle Ages from the Italian for 'influence'—the influence of the stars."

(Modern) Italian-English dictionary
* influenza (noun feminine; from Latin [noun feminine] influentia [influence]):
"1: influence
2: influenza, flu"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/influenza

(b) "At the beginning of the 20th century * * * Scientists had switched miasma theory of disease for germ theory: they understood that many diseases were caused not by 'bad airs,' but by microscopic organisms like bacteria. * * * But viruses were almost unknown."
(i) miasma (n; Did You Know?)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/miasma

Ancients in Europe also blamed miasma for cause of malaria (check etymology).
(ii) history of virology:
(A) 1884 Charles Chamberland )French, assistant to Louis Pasteur) invented Chamberlain filter (a porcelain tube as water filter within a metal outer tube);
(B) 1892 Russian postulated pathogen smaller than bacteria ("Dmitri Ivanovsky used this filter to study what is now known as the tobacco mosaic virus [TMV]. His experiments showed that crushed leaf extracts from infected tobacco plants remain infectious after filtration": en.wikipedia.org);
(C) 1898 Martinus Beijerinck (Dutch) first used the Latin noun neuter virus meaning "poison, slime, venom," to describe TMV.
(D) 1939 German physicist Ernst Ruska, working for Siemens, helped develop the first commercial electron microscope and visualized TMV virus, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.

Chamberlain filter
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberland_filter
* https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibiti ... and-filter-alt.html

(c) "Spanish flu was [note the past tense, possibly referring to 1918] exceptionally deadly—about 25 times more so than seasonal flu. No one fully understands why. * * * the recent controversy about recreating the strain responsible for the pandemic."
(i) Based on the genetic sequence, the Spanish flu virus was recreated, by a CDC-led research team, and reported in

Tumpey TM et al, Characterization of the Reconstructed 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic Virus. Science, 310: 77-80 (2005).
(ii) The truth is genes of Spanish flu virus are not very different from those of various flu viruses since then. That is why "[n]o one fully understands why." Speculations abound: maybe people at the time were not as healthy, weakened by war and starvation, lived crowded, etc.

If it ever comes back, it will be a piece of cake to treat or prevent, because humans have encountered so many flu viruses, developed immunity, not to mention antiviral medicines that were not available back then..
(d) "Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this book, though, is its global perspective, tracing the course of the disease in Brazil, India, South Africa and Australia, among other places. In Europe and North America the first world war killed more than Spanish flu; everywhere else the reverse is true. Yet most narratives focus on the West, and only partly because that is where the best records are. Ms Spinney's book goes some way to redress the balance."

From the Web: "Compared with other countries, the severity of infection in China was relatively mild."
(e) Biologically, Spanish flu is influenza A virus (H1N1), whose genetic material is RNA, not DNA. See influenza
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza
(section 2.1 Types of virus)