Experts Unlock Clues to Spread of 1918 Flu Virus

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/health/06flu.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

October 6, 2005
Experts Unlock Clues to Spread of 1918 Flu Virus
By GINA KOLATA

The 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, has been reconstructed and found to be a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, two teams of federal and university scientists announced yesterday.

It was the culmination of work that began a decade ago and involved fishing tiny fragments of the 1918 virus from snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died in the 1918 pandemic. The soldiers' tissue had been saved in an Army pathology warehouse, and the woman had been buried in permanently frozen ground.

"This is huge, huge, huge," said John Oxford, a professor of virology at St. Bartholomew's and the Royal London Hospital who was not part of the research team. "It's a huge breakthrough to be able to put a searchlight on a virus that killed 50 million people. I can't think of anything bigger that's happened in virology for many years."

The scientists painstakingly traced the genetic sequence, synthesized the virus using tools of molecular biology, and infected mice and human lung cells with it in a secure laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The research is being published in the journals Nature and Science........

Was it Steven King's book "The Stand" that opens with one of these "bugs" getting out of a military facility and laying waste to the world?

My grandma and her older brother were the only two children to survive the epidemic out of nine siblings. Her parents also died of the flu, so they were also orphaned.

So you don't get to depressed, she was adopted by a kind family by the name of "Oberlink" in Belgium.

The textbooks always said that the cause of the 1918 epidemic was never known, and they never knew why it disappeared.

This is extremely valuable research. Because so little is known about bird flu, and vacines are in such limited supply, we need to be afraid, be very afraid. Instead, our President is spending his time watching ESPN.