THE CURIOUS SIMILARITIES BETWEEN RUSSIAN FLU & CORONAVIRUS.
In May 1889, there was an influenza outbreak in Bukhara, a city of the Russian Empire that is now in Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, but not coincidentally, the Trans-caspian Railway, designed to project Russian power along the route of the old Silk Road, had reached Bukhara the previous year. The flu thus spread westward in a hurry. By the end of the year the pathogen had splashed outward from the Baltic. “Russian flu” would be the 19th century’s last serious pandemic, and would kill about a thousandth of the human species over the next few years.
Most of the mortality came in the first 12 months, with wave-like recurrences lasting into early 1895. It was “Russian flu” that killed the flaccid Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, and put the future George V in line to be King-emperor. It carried off Madame Blavatsky, the guru of Theosophy, and Berthe Morisot, most talented of the Impressionist painters. It killed the 15th Earl of Derby and made Lord Stanley, a younger brother still revered in Canada, the 16th Earl. England’s “Carbolic Smoke Ball” legal case, familiar to every lawyer reading this, was about a weird flu remedy advertised in the midst of the pandemic.
In other words, the Russian flu changed history in thousands of ways. But there’s one question no one has been able to pin down: was it actually influenza, and if so what subtype? The case-fatality for Russian flu was an order of magnitude lower than for the Spanish flu of 1918-20, and more in line with the flu pandemics of 1957, 1968 and 2009. Beyond that not much is known, or perhaps capable of being known.
But there’s one interesting possibility ... after the abortive SARS epidemic of 200204, there was a hasty flurry of genome studies done on coronaviruses, whose risk of causing a severe pandemic had not previously been recognized. Researchers studying the “molecular clock” of an endemic human coronavirus that causes colds, OC43, found something a little surprising: OC43’S DNA structure was astonishingly close to that of bovine coronavirus (BCOV), which is also endemic worldwide and causes gastrointestinal problems in cattle.
Moreover, the timing of the divergence between the genomes suggested a zoonotic crossover event in the fairly recent past. A 2005 paper in the Journal of Virology shows that the leap probably happened ... right around 1890.
If you are saying “Hmmm” right now, the authors of the 2005 paper were, too. They explicitly pointed out the coincidence of dates, and observed that the “Russian flu” had interesting clinical differences from other flu pandemics. It slaughtered the elderly but spared the young (hmm), and seemed to exhibit effects on the nervous system (hmmm), which influenza mostly doesn’t but coronaviruses sometimes do. Hardly anybody has tugged on this thread since, although the dating link was the subject of a Danish TV documentary last year. But now two infectious disease researchers, Harald and Lutz Brüssow, have ransacked extensive statistical and diagnostic records of the Russian flu in Britain and Germany to get a better peek at clinical features of the megacidal disease. They warn that “molecular clocks” pointing to 1890 aren’t exact, and note that there are “zero-archeological” reasons to think the Russian flu was actually flu: Persons born before 1890 seemed to have antibodies that protected them against the pandemic “Hong Kong flu” of 1968.
There’s no possibility, short of a lucky recovery of blood or serum samples from the period, of finding a smoking gun for either hypothesis. But the paper offers definite whiffs of suspicion. Even at the time of the Russian flu pandemic, many physicians were doubtful that the disease was what was then known as “influenza,” with some pointing to dengue. (Remember, this is before the concept of a “virus” had been formulated; some scientists were still clinging to the miasma theory of infectious disease.)
The authors confirm that the age-risk curve of Russian flu was COVID-LIKE rather than flu-like; people with prior pulmonary and cardiac conditions were in particular danger, as were the obese, and males got hit a little harder. Bronchial symptoms were less prominent than nasal drip, weakness, pain and fatigue. Autopsies often showed multi-organ thrombosis and gastrointestinal involvement. There was a noticeable quantum of long-haulers who suffered prolonged symptoms, which didn’t happen after the Spanish flu. And multiple reports mention loss of smell and taste among sufferers.
In the end, the Brüssows are forced to deliver a verdict of “not proven.” Influenza and our COVID-19 are still hard to tell apart using only diagnostic signs: there is a lot of overlap between the symptoms. Moreover, they add in their conclusion, “As the Russian flu pandemic occurred in three distinct waves, it remains possible that an influenza virus pandemic preceded or followed a coronavirus pandemic.”
Newspaper readers have already read of experts talking about the possibility that SARS-COV-2, once most of our species has been exposed to it, will be greatly reduced in severity but never eliminated. It’s possible that the terror stalking us now will simply recede and join the bestiary of coronaviruses and other pathogens that cause “colds.” But this is something not actually known to have happened ... unless, of course, the innocuous OC43 is secretly “COVID-89,” the vestige of an unsuspected biological disaster.
THE RUSSIAN FLU CHANGED HISTORY IN THOUSANDS OF WAYS.