Centuries of Influenza

412 BC - Hippocrates, the father of medicine, describes influenza for the first time.⁹

Diodorus Siculus records a flu-like epidemic that swept through the Athenian army in Sicily.

Historians speculate that influenza may have contributed to the demise of the city-state of Athens in 404 BC.¹⁰

1357 AD - The term, influenza, from the Italian word meaning "influence", is coined. Popular belief blames the development of flu on the influence of the stars.¹¹

1485 - The "sweating sickness", a flu-like malady, hits hundreds of thousands of people in Britain. The Royal Navy cannot leave port. The Lord Mayor of London, his successor, and six aldermen die. Doctors desperately prescribe tobacco juice, lime juice, emetics, cathartics, and bleeding in attempts to cure their patients.¹²

1580 - The first recorded global spread of flu - a pandemic - sweeps out of Asia, then infects Africa, Europe and America where over 90 percent of the populace is affected. Mortality is extremely high, perhaps because doctors treat their feverish patients by bleeding them.¹³

1918 - 1920 - The worst pandemic in history. Historians compare it to the Black Death of the Middle Ages - Bubonic Plague. At least 20 million people die.¹⁴

1966 - Amantadine, the first antiviral flu drug effective against influenza A, is introduced.¹⁹

1968 - The third of the century's major pandemics, the Hong Kong flu, begins.²⁰

1990's - Research learns to target and disable the flu virus at the cellular level, by inhibiting the activity of neuraminidase, a key surface protein on the two major strains of flu, A and B.²¹

1997 - A dangerous new viral strain appears in Hong Kong - Avian Hong Kong flu - which seems to spread directly from birds to humans, but a pandemic is averted.²²

1999 - Tamiflu and Relenza approved by the FDA for the teatment of influenza
A and B.

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