Influenza: Diagnosis, Treatment, Prevention - V.D. Moskaliuk 2010

Influenza
Discovery of Influenza Pathogens

The name of the disease—"Influenza" or "flu"—comes from the French word "gripper" (to attack, to seize), reflecting the epidemiological features of this infection. Colloquially, the ailment was known as "influenza," which means "to flow into" or "to infuse" in Latin.

The CAUSATIVE AGENT OF influenza is a virus first discovered by a team of British scientists: W. Smith, C. Andrewes, and P. Laidlaw during an outbreak in England. The story behind this discovery is quite fascinating. W. Smith fell ill with the flu; his colleagues took a nasal wash from the patient, passed it through a special filter, and used the filtrate to infect rare experimental animals—white African ferrets. Within 1–2 days, the animals fell ill: they lost their appetite, began to sneeze and cough, developed a fever, and showed signs of a runny Nose. Healthy ferrets were infected by the sick ones, and an epidemic of influenza broke out among the animals.

From the tracheal secretions of the sick ferrets, the researchers isolated the pathogen, which, in honor of Wilson Smith, was named the WS influenza virus, going down in The history of science as the A/WS virus.

Subsequently, expensive and rare African ferrets were replaced in experiments by white mice, which proved to be just as susceptible to the influenza virus. It was using mice in 1936–1937 that A.A. Smorodintsev in Leningrad and L.A. Zilber in Moscow isolated the first domestic strains of Influenza Viruses. Definitive Conclusions regarding THE ORIGIN OF influenza were drawn only after A.A. Smorodintsev infected human volunteers with material from sick ferrets and mice, and they developed clinical signs of influenza.

In the following years, influenza viruses were isolated from sick individuals in various countries and cities. Most of them were named after the cities where they were first isolated.

The METABOLISM/13.html">History of the Discovery of the influenza pathogen reflects the Developmental Stages of national biology. During the era of microbiology—the science of microbes and Bacteria—two scientists, M.I. Afanasyev and R. Pfeiffer, almost simultaneously grew a rod-shaped bacterium on a nutrient medium from the mucus of a flu patient's nasopharynx and classified it as the causative agent of influenza. It was named the Afanasyev-Pfeiffer bacillus. For quite some time (spanning decades, in fact), this bacillus was believed to be the true cause of the flu.

Doubts regarding this claim arose as early as the Spanish flu pandemic, when Selter infected himself with the filtered nasal mucus of an influenza patient—a filtrate that could not possibly contain bacteria—and fell ill. However, aside from raising doubts, this bold experiment produced nothing tangible and proved nothing conclusively. For many years to come (until 1933), the Afanasyev-Pfeiffer bacillus was still considered the causative agent of influenza.

In 1940, during an influenza epidemic, a virus was isolated from a sick person that was very similar to the influenza virus, yet slightly distinct from it. It was designated as influenza virus B.

Later, 7 years afterwards, R. Taylor discovered yet another virus similar to the influenza pathogen, which differed from the viruses isolated in 1933 and 1940, and named it influenza virus C.