Up until now, the scientific community believed that fatal viral types of pneumonia due to flu (influenza) viruses followed a standard scenario. The work recently carried out by researchers in the Pathology Laboratory at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, led by Professor Daniel Desmecht, has proved that nothing could be farther from the truth! By taking two radically different but just as virulent strains of virus, they demonstrated that two objectively different diseases were obtained! To be precise, two diseases that attack the body in different ways. A great advance, which should soon lead to the development of drug responses adapted to each strain of the influenza virus. Which is not the case today…

Although there are few who can remember the terrible flu pandemics of 1918 – which caused 50 million deaths –, 1957 and 1968, this is not the case of the scientific community, which is well aware that the return of such an extensive pandemic is no fantasy.  “In fact, specialists dread it”, confirms Daniel Desmecht, researcher in the pathology department of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Liège and author of a recent publication  which is bound to make a stir. Firstly, there is the fact that the “influenza” activity occupies a third of the laboratory’s staff, which was reinforced by the H5N1 crisis, and more recently, by the one associated with the Mexican strain. And secondly, there is the virulence of the influenza viruses that infect between 5 and 15% of the world’s human population every year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), causing the deaths of some 500,000 people. Furthermore, as was the case in 2009, certain unseasonal strains, which do not consist of a simple evolution of the previous year’s virus, are appearing. These are pandemic viruses, whose mortality rate is currently impossible to predict… Hence, in human therapy, there are between 500,000 and 50 million people who die mainly as a result of two possible complications: on the one hand, secondary bacterial pneumonia and, on the other hand, primary viral pneumonia, where the virus multiplies considerably in the lungs. This is what the specialists call “acute respiratory distress syndrome” (ARDS), which results in human infections such as “severe acute respiratory syndrome” (SARS) and H5N1. It is currently believed that patients who dies of primary viral pneumonia, whether it is seasonal or pandemic, die from a disease whose mechanistic workings remain unchanged.