Comment by linuxkerneldev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linuxkerneldev | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> non-immunocompromised person will fight off basically any upper respiratory infection without a problem.

I am curious if this is true, ie: does medical science hold above as an accepted fact by general consensus?

I ask because my understanding is that the 1918 flu (aka Spanish flu) which was an H1N1 (upper respiratory infection in humans , intestinal tract in birds) predominantly killed young adults, ie: healthy non-immunocompromised people. Here's the wikipedia remark:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic

"the 1918 pandemic predominantly killed previously healthy young adults."

"a rapid progressive respiratory failure and death through a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system). It was then postulated that the strong immune reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths among those groups"

But there's some conflicting explanations: "special circumstances (malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, poor hygiene) promoted bacterial superinfection that killed most of the victims typically after a somewhat prolonged death bed "

If it's the flu, it's not treatable with antibiotics. Antivirals, general care, symptom relief, and vaccines are the best we've got.

You've got to remember, too, that it wasn't an especially virulent strain of influenza alone that caused the deaths from 1917-1919. It spread quickly among the war-weary, crowded, exposure-riddled young men who lived with chickens and hogs at the battlefronts. It was common practice at the time to logistically set up small-pen animals close to the long, mostly stable fronts as a source of local food rather than shipping in so much preserved food. Those young men then travelled far and wide across the continent and even overseas as their service rotations came and especially when hostilities ceased.

https://virus.stanford.edu/uda/ tells the story about as well and succinctly as any source. http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/body-and-mind/the-spanish-... and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862337/ have lots of information.

As is common, the war's conditions and aftereffects killed far more people than died in combat. It was a nasty flu, but humans helped it out about the best we could.

Flu is actually a systemic infection, not s respiratory infection. It's not very treatable, except symptomatically, anyway. If the Spanish flu came back today, we'd have almost as hard a time dealing with it now as we did then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com