With the onset of the first cold weather in 1977, an outbreak of an unusual flu was recorded on the territory of the USSR, which in a strange way took the lives of children and young people under 25 years old.
This virus, which quickly spread by airborne droplets, soon crossed the borders of the Soviet state, causing the infection and death of several hundred thousand people in different countries of the world. Since the first cases of death from it were registered in Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, and its type was urgently determined at the Moscow Research Institute of Virology, it was called “Russian flu”.
Russian flu
In fact, the “Russian flu”, like most of its predecessors, was born in the expanses of Central and Southeast Asia. In the spring, this strain raged in South China, from where it moved to Japan, and after that it ended up in the Far East of the USSR. Unlike their Asian counterparts, Soviet doctors sounded the alarm and, having discovered the structure of its origin, sent data regarding this virus to laboratories in different countries.
Grip structure
After conducting a medical analysis of the isolated virus, Soviet scientists came to the conclusion that its structure was of a mixed nature. At the initial stage of development, the “Russian flu” was generated by two viruses – A / H3N2 and B, while in the autumn-winter period it was already caused by three serotypes – A / H3N2, A / H1N1 and B.
As a result of an etiological study, it was found that this flu was very similar to the “Spanish flu”, which caused the death of more than 42 million people in 1918-1920, and the epidemic that circulated in 1947.
Dmitry Lvov, who dealt with the problems of virology, argued that the strains of the “Russian flu” that contributed to the 1977 epidemic of the year were identical in several key properties to the viruses that Soviet researchers in 1975 found in whales near Antarctica. Revealing that a number of genes of the whale virus was similar to the genes of the bird flu virus, he suggested that the carriers of influenza are birds. In his opinion, the whales became infected by eating plankton, abundantly flavored with bird excrement, which, in fact, contained the virus.
Feature of the pandemic
The first feature of the “Russian flu” epidemic, according to virologist Tatyana Ilyicheva, is associated with the main contingent of its defeat.
For generations of people who in the past were infected with similar viruses and successfully coped with them, the “old new flu” of 1977 was not dangerous, because antibodies against this strain were present in their bodies. That is why the main target of the “Russian flu” was young people who had not previously come into contact with H1N1 serotype viruses and did not have immunity against it.
Despite the fact that 30-year-old individuals at that time accounted for more than 50% of the total population, the incidence rate in this age category did not exceed 20%, not to mention mature and elderly people who were practically bypassed by the epidemic.
In his research, molecular biologist Sergey Netesov notes the second feature of the “Russian flu”, which was the relatively mild course of this disease. In total, in 42.2% of cases, doctors made a diagnosis indicating a moderate severity of the course of the disease, and 57.8% of patients suffered this flu in a mild form.
Special operation
The Finnish professor of virology Kalle Saksela expressed the opinion that the epidemic of the “Russian flu” was not natural, but artificial in nature, to the creation of which Soviet researchers had a hand.
According to his assumption, it arose as a result of recombination or mixing of viruses that had been stored in the laboratory’s storerooms for a long time. Saxela suggested that the generated virus could represent either an erroneous vaccine test or a biological weapon.
