A virologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, van Riel has spent years studying how flu causes ravages beyond the respiratory tract.
She has done so in human cells grown in a dish, in animal models and in patients—trying to capture, from the different angles these offer, the complex cascade of biochemical events that infection with various subtypes of the influenza A virus sets off in the body’s tissues.
American Ward at Fourth Scottish General Hospital, where most patients are influenza cases, in November 1918. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Her subjects have included H5N1, the aggressive “bird” flu that—until last year—was considered a leading candidate for the cause of the next pandemic, the H1N1 “swine” flu that caused the most recent flu pandemic, in 2009, and the mother of them all, the virus that caused the so-called “Spanish” flu pandemic of 1918. Earlier this year, van Riel switched her attention to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and saw that—though it behaves differently from flu—it too has effects far beyond the respiratory tract. “At least in its severe form, we should consider COVID-19 a systemic disease,” she says—something that is also true of flu.
You can read the article in Time, here.
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