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Scientists Reconstruct 1918 Spanish Flu

from the October 11, 2005 eNews issue
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Health experts and other officials from around the world traveled to Washington last week to discuss a coordinated response to the bird flu epidemic. The meeting included representatives from 65 countries and international organizations. The goal was to develop ways to share information and resources, in case the virus becomes a pandemic.

The gathering in Washington comes just one day after two teams of scientists announced that they had reproduced the 1918 Spanish flu virus. The so-called Spanish flu emerged just after the end of World War I. It was perhaps the most deadly pandemic in human history. It killed between 20 and 50 million people, more than the Black Plague or AIDS.

Scientists have discovered that the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. It has taken scientists 10 years to reconstruct the virus. They did so using lung tissue from two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died in the 1918 pandemic. According to the New York Times, "The findings, published in the journals Nature and Science, show a small number of genetic changes that may explain why this virus was so lethal. It is significantly different from flu viruses that caused the pandemics of 1957 and 1968. Those viruses were not bird flu viruses but were human flu viruses that picked up a few genetic elements of bird flu."

There have been 4 pandemics during the last century, which emerge, on average, every 30 years. Between one and four million people died during the last flu pandemic, which hit Hong Kong in 1968. Health experts at the WHO have indicated that we are long overdue for an outbreak, the WHO spokesman recently made the statement that: "As with an earthquake or any other natural occurring phenomena, we cannot give an exact time but the situation now is particularly concerning in that we are so long after the last pandemic. We are living perhaps on borrowed time."

Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization officials have repeatedly warned that the avian influenza, also known as the bird flu, could become a global epidemic if a new strain of the virus emerges that can jump readily from human to human. There is a vaccine for the bird flu. However officials do not currently have an ability to mass produce it or get it to people quickly. If there is an outbreak health officials estimate that it would spread rapidly and could infect nearly one-third of the world's population. It could kill anywhere from 2 million to 50 million people.

With the advent of antibiotics 50 years ago, scientists predicted the end of death and suffering from infectious diseases. During the past 25 years, however, we have witnessed the reemergence and geographical spread of well-known diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera, often in more virulent and drug-resistant forms. Scientists have also identified more than 30 previously unknown diseases, like HIV and Ebola, for which there is no known cure. According to the National Institute of Health infectious diseases remain the leading cause of death worldwide, and the third leading cause of death in the United States. Diseases thought to be obsolete have once again become a global threat, and in recent years new pathogens have emerged, some of which carry antibiotic-resistant genes or mutations enabling them to move across different species. Biotechnology and global pestilence are among the Strategic Trends that we monitor regularly on our website. Click on the links below for more information.