American newspaper: Russia is the origin of Corona, and it appeared 130 years ago

In May 1889, people living in Bukhara, a city that was then part of the Russian Empire, began to fall ill and die from a respiratory virus that became known as Russian flu.

This flu swept the world, filling hospitals and killing the elderly in particular.

Schools and factories had to close because so many students and workers were sick.

Some patients described a strange symptom, loss of smell and taste, and some of those who recovered reported persistent fatigue.

The Russian flu finally ended a few years later, after at least three waves of infection.

Patterns of infection and symptoms have led some virologists and medical historians to question the possibility that the Russian flu was, in fact, a coronavirus-driven pandemic?

And the possibility that its course will give us clues about how our epidemic will end?

Some believe that the Russian pathogen may still be present, and its mutants are transmitted around the world as one of the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold.

But if this is the case, the type of disease will be different from influenza epidemics, whose viruses remain for a period of time to be replaced by new mutants after years that cause a new epidemic, according to a report by the American New York Times.

The newspaper quoted Frank Snowden of Yale University in the United States as saying that "there is very little and almost no firm data" about the influenza epidemic in Russia.

There is, however, a way to solve the Russian flu puzzle. Molecular biologists now have the tools to pull ancient virus fragments from preserved lung tissue from Russian flu victims and figure out what kind of virus caused that epidemic.

Some researchers are now searching for such tissues preserved in museums and medical schools in ancient jars of specimens floating in liquid preservatives that still contain parts of the lung.

The newspaper quotes Tom Ewing, from Virginia Tech and one of the historians who studied the Russian flu, as saying that "it is not possible to ignore the observation of similarities with the coronavirus epidemic today."

"I'd say maybe," Ewing said when asked if Russian flu was a coronavirus.

Dr. Scott Podolsky, professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, called the idea "reasonable".

"It's a very interesting speculation," said Dr. Arnold Munto, professor of public health, epidemiology and global health at the University of Michigan.

"We have long wondered where coronaviruses came from, and whether there was a coronavirus epidemic in the past," said Dr. Montu.

Harald Brusseau, a retired Swiss microbial scientist and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Microbial Biotechnology, points to a paper published in 2005 that concluded that another coronavirus circulating today, known as OC43, which causes severe colds, may have jumped from cows to humans in the 1890s.

Similar to Covid, says Dr. Brousseau, the Russian flu appears to have killed more elderly people but not children.

Dr. Ewing, who examined 1,890 records from the Connecticut State Board of Health, found a similar pattern.

If true, that would make the 1890 virus different from influenza viruses that kill the young as well as the elderly.

But historical records cannot easily answer the question of whether the coronavirus caused the Russian flu.

Dr Snowden of Yale University cautioned that any lessons he could draw from that pandemic that could apply to a world where the novel coronavirus has shaken societies would be a "fantasy".

C said.

Alexander Navarro, a historian at the University of Michigan, said that as the Russian flu epidemic subsided, "people quickly got on with their lives."

The same happened with the influenza epidemic of 1918, and Navarro added that "grief was the affair of those who had almost lost loved ones."

The idea that the Russian flu might be caused by a coronavirus is still speculative, said Peter Palesey, a flu researcher and professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

But for those seeking hints about how the current coronavirus pandemic will end, some believe these past two pandemics can provide evidence.

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