Pesky bug, and cats, are much to muse about

Press, 22 July 1989, Page 22

Pesky bug, and cats, are much to muse about

Country Diary

Derrick Rooney

The trouble with being laid up by a winter virus — specifically, the flu-related virus that got me this time — is that it’s such a dreadfully undramatic illness: no midnight race to hospital, no bloodstained bandages, no operation scar to show off, not even a bottle of pills. Not much coughing or sniffling, either. Just a week or so of feeling bloody miserable and clapped out. There is a bright side: it’s part of a long-running relationship. Everyone who gets a flu-like virus is continuing something that started thousands of years ago. I suppose you could say that influenza needs us more than we need influenza, but what the hell. Even its name is several centuries old, coined in Italy in the fifteenth century by astrologically minded medical men who failed to curb an epidemic, and blamed it on the stars. At various times, swamp gases, unseasonal weather, witches and pigs have also been blamed for flu. It took more than 2300 years, between the first properly documented epidemic (recorded by tha-jarand daddy of medicine, Hippocrates, in 412 8.C.) and the third decade of this century, for

people to find out what really causes flu.

A noted American publichealth scientist once described flu as the last great plague of man. That was before A.I.D.S. but the point is taken. Flu is a mean critter. It can flit between humans and other animals and mutate, and every time you think you have it whacked, up it pops in another form.

Since the seventeenth century, flu has been the world’s most widespread and persistent disease. Every 25 years, on aver-

age, it has caused a pandemic. Every year there is an epidemic — somewhere. And the symptoms haven’t changed much. Here’s how Lord Randolph described a bout that struck down Queen Mary’s household in Edinburgh in 1562: "... Immediately upon the Quene’s arivall here, she fell acquainted with a new disease that is common in this towne, called here the newe acquayntance, which passed also through her whole courte, neither sparinge lordes, ladies nor damoysells not so much as either Frenche or English. It ys a plague in their heads that have yt, and a soreness in their stomackes, with a great coughe, that remayneth with some longer, with others shorter tyme, as yt findeth apte bodies for the nature of the disease. The queen kept her bed six days. There was no appearance of danger, nor manie that die of the disease, excepte some olde folks .. ‘ A couple of decades later, came the first great pandemic of modern times: flu swept through Asia, Africa, and Europe, killing - an unknown but large number of 1 people. The standard treatment

of the time — bloodletting — surely helped a lot of them to die. This year in New Zealand, incidentally, is the seventieth anniversary of the greatest flu pandemic of all: the so-called Spanish flu which started in 1918 and in two years swept round the world, killing millions. One estimate put the number of deaths on the Indian sub-continent alone at 20 million. Alaska and some of the Pacific Islands lost half their populations. Half a million Americans died. Whole families were laid low. Some people died within 24 hours of showing the first symptom. Business, commerce, and government were interrupted on a huge scale. Theatres and other public buildings were closed. Police and other emergency workers went around in masks — which gave them only psychological protection. The outcome of World War I was almost reversed in the critical last few months of fighting when outbreaks in training camps slowed the delivery of _ essential Allied reinforcements T to a trickle. The American troops were the first to get the virus,

and some 43,000 of them died of it — almost as many as were killed in the fighting. Fortunately for us, the pandemic struck the Germans too. Statistics like these don’t cheer you up when you have the flu, but they do make you consider that, even if it keeps you indoors for a few days, a dose that just makes you bloody miserable is hardly worth complaining about. It sure makes you wonder when the next pandemic is coming, though. We’re overdue for one.

The statistics of the Great Flu also provide another opportunity to ponder one of the many historical examples of the duplicity of military propaganda machines.

Spanish flu? Most historical accounts of the 1918-19 pandemic agree that the first identifiable outbreak occurred among troops stationed in Kansas in March, 1918. The name “Spanish flu” was coined instead of “American flu” because the military authorities refused to admit the truth about the major effect the virus was having on troop strength and battle fitness. Tnere’s been some female trouble in the household; four-

legged female trouble, that is. About a year ago my daughter brought home a tortoiseshell kitten, and the Senior Cat, who is rising 12 and what a geneticist would call the nonmutant type — i.e., a light grey tabby — just hasn’t been able to come to terms with it.

The vet reckons they’ve got psychological problems, and he’s probably right. But I reckon the chromosomes have a hand in it too. Maybe that’s why Kits is being such a wimp. Kits has got domesticated genes. It’s all quite complicated, really, and some might say farfetched, but you can pick a cat’s antecedents by the colour of its coat. That’s where cats express their genetic characters. The Senior Cat has wild genes. In her middle age she had her humans neatly tied around one paw and she knows just how to make them feel guilty if they boot her off an armchair or kick her out of bed, but underneath she’s a hedgerow cat. She doesn’t need people, but she knows how to use them. She’d rather eat a sparrow than a spoon of jallymeat but if there isn’t a sparrow to be had she’ll have the jellymeat. Kits needs

people. She’d rather have the jellymeat.

Kits has genes that she can only have got from a long line of domesticated cats. She’s a blend of blotched tabby (the common New Zealand domesticated type, I believe) and something called the “sex-linked orange allele.” It's the latter that makes her tortoiseshell, and the tortoiseshell that makes her female. It’s not actually impossible for a tortoiseshell to be a tom — but it would be an amazing anomaly. The whole thing is very complicated but what it comes down to, in simplest terms, is that cats’ genes determine both their colour and sex. .

Cat colours also reflect patterns of human migration and commerce, because cats have accompanied human traders and travellers throughout history. New Zealand was settled primarily from Britain, so New Zealand cats bear more than a passing resemblance to British cats. The cats of London and Paris and Christchurch are more like each other than like, say, the cats of rural Provence or the cats of rural Siberia. k Geneticists redcon that distribution patterns indicate that the

gene responsible for sex-linked orange — which created the ginger, or marmalade, tomcat — originated in Asia Minor, and spread north from there.

For the same reason that tortoiseshells are female, ginger cats are mostly (not always) males.

This happens because (I hope I’ve got it right) the orange gene is carried by the female X chromosome. Male cats normally have one X and one Y chromosome — so if the X chromosome happens to be the sex-linked orange one, they must be ginger. In other words, male cats can’t, in normal circumstances, be simultaneously ginger and other colours, whereas female cats, which have two X chromosomes, can.

What does Kits think about all this? Not a lot, really; she’s too busy either avoiding the Senior Cat or sleeping in the cubbyhole she found underneath the ovenfoot of the coal stove, where the Senior Cat doesn’t fit (soon Kits won’t fit, either). The Boss Cat takes no notice of any of this. As long as they keep out of his .way the females don’t bother hi®. But he’s Siamese, and his genes are recessive.