A short voyage into the past: former misconceptions and misinterpretations in the etiology of some viral diseases

Abstract

The advancement of human knowledge has historically followed the pattern of one-step growth (the same pattern followed by microorganisms in laboratory culture conditions). In this way, each new important discovery opened the door to multiple secondary breakthroughs, eventually reaching a "plateau" when new findings emerged. Microbiology research has usually followed this pattern, but often the conclusions attained from experimentation/observation were either equivocal or altogether false, causing important delays in the advancement of this science. This mini-review deals with some of these documented scientific errors, but the aim is not to include every mistake, but to select those that are paramount to the advance of Microbiology.

Animal and human RNA viruses: genetic variability and ability to overcome vaccines

“…No one currently questions the fact that influenza is caused by a virus, but this was not the case at the end of the nineteenth century, or even during the first two decades of the twentieth century, when it was erroneously assumed that the illness was caused by a bacterium, named Bacillus influenzae (Twort and Twort 1921 ). Additional misconceptions about the etiological agents of other viral diseases are described in the review by Villa et al ( 2018 ).…”

“…The incorrectly named, infamous “Spanish flu” (January 1918–December 1920) was caused by the Influenza A pandemic strain N1H1, an orthomyxovirus containing genes of avian origin, that infected over 500 million people a caused an estimated 50 to 100 million casualties (3–6% of the human population at the time). This was the second known flu pandemic to spread over the world (Villa et al 2018 ); the first well documented worldwide occurred in 1580, it started in Asia and spread to Europe, via Asia Minor, and North–West Africa, eventually reaching the Americas (Potter 2001 ). More recent pandemic waves include the “Asian influenza”, this was originated by an avian H2N2 virus that started in China in 1957 and caused an estimated two million deaths worldwide; the “Hong Kong” influenza of 1968, produced by a H3N2 influenza A virus that resulted in one million deaths; while a new strain of N1H1 emerged in the 2009 pandemic with the ability to infect, not only humans, but also several animal species, such as pigs, horses and birds.…”