Who Discovered Influenza
  There are many claims on who discovered influenza, however the main school of thought is that no one actually discovered it. During our extensive research we have come across several individuals that have created a really great resource on what nailing down the facts. We have included these in this article.
“A troublesome cough, with great spitting, also a Catarrh falling down on the palat, throat and nostrils, also accompanied with a feaverish distemper, joyned with heat and thirst, and want of appetite, a spontaneous weariness, and a grievous pain in the back and limbs,”
So Thomas Willis, a London physician, described the symptoms of the influenza that struck England in April 1657. Dr. Willis, like most medical experts until the late 19th Century, ascribed the epidemic to a “blast of the stars”; there name “influenza,” according to some scholars, is a contraction of the Italian influentia coeli — “celestial influence.”
So sudden and severe was each epidemic that it seemed logical to attribute the disease to an extraterrestrial event.
Today influenza retains little of its former mystery. Virologists, epidemiologists and medical historians have explained most aspects of the disease and even devised safe annual inoculations that confer temporary immunity to it. Influenza is now known to be an acute, highly contagious respiratory infection caused by a virus slightly larger than most cold viruses. Yet though it is no longer a mystery, flu remains an urgent medical concern. Epidemics occur in many parts of the world each year, and pandemics extremely severe, global epidemics erupt at intervals of 10 to 50 years. During an epidemic, as much as 40 per cent of the population may catch flu. Of these, about 1 per cent suffer serious complications, primarily pneumonia.
The death rate from flu and its complications is quite low, about .03 per cent of the United States population during one typical recent outbreak, the 1968-1969 pandemic of Hong Kong flu, but the sheer number of dead is staggering: The pandemic killed 56,000 people in the United States, then recurred the next winter in Europe, killing 30,000 people during an eight-week period in Britain alone. Flu’s notoriety stems from its ability to survive and prosper in this fashion when many more deadly diseases have been prevented by universal vaccination or controlled with antibiotics. Influenza is, in fact, the last great infectious plague and the virus that causes it is one of the most intensively studied infectious agents in all of medicine. So the closest person we can identify as to who discovered influenza iis Thomas Willis. Though some historians may disagree with our findings, this English physicians has the earliest writings and documentation on the flu. |
