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Hello, my name is Anthony Rees.
I'm a chemist,
turned biochemist.
I was a university lecturer in
molecular biophysics at
the University of Oxford,
and later Professor and Head of
Biochemistry at the
University of Bath.
My field of interest
is immunology
with a special interest
in antibodies.
Since 2012, I've been writing
about the history of antibodies
and more recently vaccines.
The lectures in this
three-part series
relate to the
history of vaccines.
In January of 2022,
last year, my book on
the history of vaccines
was published,
and it's from this book
that I've selected
a few examples of
pathogens that have afflicted
the human population
over thousands of years.
We'll look at some of
the early curative and
often crude measures
used before the advent of
modern medical technologies,
and in particular,
the seismic effect of
vaccines on preventing
human disease and
reducing mortality.
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Welcome to the third and last in
this short series on the
history of vaccines.
Today we'll be looking at
influenza and coronaviruses.
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As you can see on this slide,
I've said influenza, a
pathogenic chameleon.
You'll see why chameleon
as we move forward.
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Influenza is an RNA virus,
but with a genome structure that
encourages what we call
strain diversification,
and with it, of course,
severe immunological
consequences.
It's a member of the
orthomyxoviridae family,
which includes seven genera.
Four types of influenza virus,
the A, B, C,
and D, which you
might have heard of,
and three types of
tick-borne viruses,
thogotovirus, quaranjavirus,
and isavirus.
The last one
infecting fish only.
Influenza A is the most
virulent and the B sub types,
they cause seasonal epidemics
of disease in many
parts of the world,
usually during winter, but
less severe than influenza A.
The C subtype type
infections generally cause
only a mild respiratory illness
and rarely if ever
cause epidemics.
While the D subtype
primarily affects cattle
and isn't known to
cause infection and
illness in the human population,
and we always have
to say as yet.
Emergence of novel influenza
A variant subtypes
has been the cause of a series
of intermittent
pandemics and epidemics
over the intervening years
since the notorious Spanish flu.
That was a pandemic
of 1918-1919,
which had something like
500 million cases or
morbidity of which 50-100
million deaths occurred.
Some of the key epidemics and
pandemics in recent times
have been the Asian flu in 1957,
where there were
1-2 million deaths,
the range, of course,
depending on data sources,
but less fatal in the elderly.
That was explained
by them having
residual immunity from
an 1989 epidemic.
The younger people, of course,
would not have had that.
The Hong Kong flu in 1968,
around one million deaths.
That had a high infection rate.
But it could have been
worse if not from
the residual immunity
from the 1957 virus.
There were two waves of
infection in the Hong Kong flu.
A bit later in 1977,
the Russian flu hit.
And this was a pseudo pandemic.
Pseudo because it only affected
mainly those less
than 25 years of
age with the older persons
already immune,
hence the pseudo.
I just maybe mention a
note that there have been
conspiracy theories on
this particular Russian flu
epidemic or pseudo pandemic,
that this was an escaped virus
from Chinese departures.
Something we'll be
talking about a
bit later with coronaviruses,
but of course not proven
for the Russian flu.
Then we have the swine
flu pandemic in 2009,
mitigated by the rapid
development of vaccines.
We'll have a bit more to
say about this later.
