Mailund on the Internet

Bayblab posted on this news story:

The body of an aristocrat who died nearly 90 years ago has been exhumed in the hope that it will help scientists combat a future flu pandemic.

Didn’t they already do roughly the same thing back in 2005?

Characterization of the Reconstructed 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic Virus
Tumpey et al. Science 310(5745) pp. 77 – 80, 2005

The pandemic influenza virus of 1918–1919 killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people worldwide. With the recent availability of the complete 1918 influenza virus coding sequence, we used reverse genetics to generate an influenza virus bearing all eight gene segments of the pandemic virus to study the properties associated with its extraordinary virulence. In stark contrast to contemporary human influenza H1N1 viruses, the 1918 pandemic virus had the ability to replicate in the absence of trypsin, caused death in mice and embryonated chicken eggs, and displayed a high-growth phenotype in human bronchial epithelial cells. Moreover, the coordinated expression of the 1918 virus genes most certainly confers the unique high-virulence phenotype observed with this pandemic virus.

The Spanish flu

The Spanish flu is a nasty virus. It’s an influenza that from 1918 to 1920 killed between 20 and 100 million people worldwide.  In comparison, only about 20 million were killed in the entire First World War, so if you look at deaths per year in the early 20th century, it is the Spanish flu that will show a spike, more than the war.

It was a truly global epidemic.  It is called the Spanish flu because the Spanish press wrote about it (most other countries had the press censored during the war, but Spain wasn’t involved in the war), but really it was found everywhere across the globe, with as much as 20% of the world population infected and killing 2.5-5% of the worldwide population.

With the danger of sounding like a mad scientist, I am really fascinated by this epidemic.

Digging up victims, to try to recreate the flu, might not be the brightest idea ever, but the reason people want to do this is to learn more about influenza epidemics.  With all the scare about the bird flu, we might need all the knowledge about influenza we can get.

There is absolutely nothing preventing a new worldwide epidemic like the Spanish flu, and we really want to be prepared if that happens.

Reconstructing the Spanish flu

I’m not sure exactly what the plan is for Sir Mark Sykes — the guy they are digging up now — but what they did in the Science paper was to re-create the Spanish flu virus from the samples they got there.

They managed to get the sequence of the Spanish flu virus genome and then combine it with (the modern) H1N1 virus, to get viruses with more or less of the Spanish flu in them.  These they then grew to learn about the virus.

Knowing the sequence of the Spanish flu will let us analyse the evolution of it and maybe tell us where it came from (jumping from another species; recombining or mutating to that particular variant; etc.)

Actually growing the virus lets us experiment with it, learn how deadly it really is and how it works (see e.g. this story), maybe develop vaccines (not that that would be much help against a new epidemic variant, but we might learn something from it).

Tags: influenza, Spanish flu

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Paper reviews, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.