Just Finished re-Reading: Catching Cold – 1918’s Forgotten Tragedy and the Scientific Hunt for the Virus that Caused it by Pete Davies (FP: 1999) [304pp]

This is a rare beast – a RE-read. I read it first around 20 years ago when it first came out in paperback and certainly found it interesting enough at the time to hang on to it. With the ‘current situation’ still on-going I thought it deserved to have the dust literally blown off it and to be re-read.

It starts with a slow motion panic in China. A patient has died of acute respiratory failure and the doctors have no real idea what killed her. A few days later there is another and then one more. The symptoms have commonalities although the patients – now all dead – seem to have nothing in common and also seem never to have come into contact with each other. Samples are sent to CDC in Atlanta and research units in Britain and Holland. When the results come back the panic starts. It’s a completely new strain of Influenza with what looks like a high lethality. Doctors are dispatched to China to find out more and co-ordinate a response.  Another case is discovered and then another. They are widely dispersed and, again, seem to have not come into contact with each other. As they fight for their lives a decision is made. ALL wildfowl in the affect zone are to be killed and incinerated – immediately. Weeks later, with hundreds of thousands of dead birds burnt and buried, no new cases in humans have been reported. It looks like a potential bullet has been dodged and there is talk of another ‘1918’.

Until recently, as we are now only too aware, the 1918 Influenza Pandemic mislabelled the ‘Spanish Flu’ had been largely forgotten. After events in China around 20 years ago the disaster of that Pandemic was very much in the minds of some of the world’s top Epidemiologists. The problem was, even with gene sequencing coming on-line there was nothing available to sequence. No ‘live’ virus existed anywhere in the world. So it was time to go looking for it. The main focus of the book was the project to exhume bodies that had died of the ‘Spanish flu’ above the Arctic circle where they would have remained cold enough for tissue recovered from them to, potentially at least, still hold the virus. Two other lines of investigation were also followed in somewhat less detail – the existing holdings of the US Army Medical Service and a ‘freelance’ investigator operating in Alaska. The concern I still remember from 20 years ago was that the virus could indeed to found and then accidentally released into the environment with devastating consequences.

This was actually an interesting and valuable re-read. A good chunk of the book spent time looking at the world-wide effects of the 1918 Pandemic and the attempts to hold it back. Naturally as the theory of viruses was only just being discussed and the fact that no virus had ever been isolated at that time it was impossible to do much except essentially keep away from other people – AKA Social Distance. But they did try, or at least think about, other things – including encouraging people to smoke and, my particular favourite, inject people with creosote! There is nothing new under the Sun it seems. If you can get hold of this book and are still interested in reading about something that we’re all actually experiencing this is well worth the effort. More Pandemic reading to come.