1918 Flu = Bird Flu

From The New York Times tomorrow:
Experts Unlock Clues to Spread of 1918 Flu Virus:

“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.…”

Interesting implications.


The Guardian’s take: From frozen Alaska to the lab: a virus 39,000 times more virulent than flu:

“…‘I didn’t expect it to be as lethal as it was,’ Dr Terrence Tumpey, a scientist on the project from the US Centres of Disease Control and Prevention, told the journal Nature.…”


From CBC World News: Scientists re-create deadly pandemic virus

“…The growing fear of a flu pandemic led U.S. President George Bush to speculate Tuesday on possible American reactions to such a crisis, including quarantines of infected groups of people.…”