(Author’s note: This will be another multi-part series; get comfy or buckle up, whichever you prefer. If you have not gone here to watch Dr. Ott’s take on the Bird flu via 12 videos, you may want to catch up before Part 2. )
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Ready to go down the rabbit hole? Ready to decide for yourself what is actually going on? Reported deaths for the 1918 flu range from 20 million to 100 million worldwide with most reports at around 40-50 million. From what I have been able to ascertain, subsequent pandemics did not have the same hallmarks/virus combinations as the Spanish flu making the Mexican flu “rare” but only on the timeline. It is more than a little bit similar to the Spanish Flu with elements of avian, swine, and human virus strains. In 1951 and 1997, bodies were exhumed and the Spanish flu virus captured for researchers to study. When it was first reported in 1998, I thought it was an profoundly dangerous idea, considering the military was hunting this little microbe down, and it seems it may have been. Will we ever really know? Not likely, but I can have my suspicions.
What follows are two articles with background information about the 1918 Spanish Pandemic and the hunt for the lethal virus. Also, please be aware that some of the findings in these initial reports have changed and will be in subsequent articles in this series.
From The NYTimes, February 24, 1998:
Lethal Virus Comes Out of Hiding
DEEP in a freezer in a closet-sized room at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology here are tiny vials of a clear liquid containing irreplaceable molecules. They are submicroscopic shards of one of the most deadly viruses the world has ever known, the influenza virus that swept the world in 1918.
The viral fragments come from the lungs of three victims of that epidemic: a soldier who died in South Carolina, one who died in New York and an Eskimo woman who died in a village on the northern coast of Alaska. They may be all that is left of that terrifying microbe.
But scientists treasure them for more than their historic value. If the virus strain ever emerges again, the fragments may be the crucial tools needed to save the world from a lethal epidemic.
Already scientists are analyzing the fragments, which may enable them to make a vaccine against the 1918 flu and to study whether current antiviral drugs would be effective against it, said Dr. Robert Webster, the head of the department of virology and molecular biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. With luck, he said, scientists will learn why the 1918 flu was so deadly and where it came from. The answers will solve one of the great medical mysteries.
How the virus fragments were found is a detective story that began 50 years ago when a Swedish pathologist came to the United States and became obsessed with finding the virus that caused the 1918 epidemic, and ended last year because a young molecular biologist working for the Defense Department had discovered how to find viruses in the decayed tissue of dolphins.
The pathologist, Dr. Johan V. Hultin, now 72, an adventurer who thought nothing of working up to 18 hours a day in the Alaskan cold in the quest, and the biologist, Dr. Jeffrey K. Taubenberger, 36, whose fascination with the actual viral genes was so complete that he never took a 10-minute drive to see where the tissue specimens were stored, combined their efforts to identify the 1918 virus that killed 20 million to 40 million people. Dr. Hultin produced crucial evidence when he traveled to the remote Alaskan village to exhume the body of the Eskimo whose still-frozen lungs contained molecular footprints of the virus.
Not since the Black Death of the 14th century had the world seen an epidemic like the 1918 flu, which killed 675,000 people in this country, and 43,000 United States servicemen. About half of the deaths of United States servicemen in World War I were caused not by battle but by the flu. Young healthy people would fall ill and die within a few days.
Families were ravaged. James D. H. Reefer of Kansas City wrote to the flu researchers to tell them that when he was 4 years old and his brother was 6 that his 30-year-old father and his 27-year-old mother got the flu and died within a few days of each other, unable to breathe as the virus destroyed the air sacs of their lungs. ”Older members of the family later told me they simply drowned,” Mr. Reefer recalled.
Ever since that 1918 epidemic, medical experts have lived in dread that the virus would re-emerge and hoped that if it did, they would be able to recognize and fight it. But for that, they needed to know what made it so deadly.
Although the 1918 flu was the most dangerous in recorded history, influenza pandemics seem to sweep the world every 30 years or so. The last one was the Hong Kong flu in 1968, making the current effort particularly urgent, some say.
Dr. Hultin had been fascinated with the 1918 flu for most of his career. He came to the United States from his native Sweden in 1949 and later wrote his master’s thesis on influenza epidemics at the University of Iowa, where he studied microbiology. He was particularly horrified by the flu’s devastation of the Eskimos; at the epidemic’s height, entire villages were wiped out overnight.
In 1950, while at the university in Iowa, Dr. Hultin overheard a visiting virologist say that the only hope of understanding the 1918 flu would be to find the virus in the bodies of victims who might have been buried in permafrost, ground so cold it never thawed. Dr. Hultin saw an opportunity. The summer before, he had driven to Alaska for adventure and met a paleontologist, working with him in a search for bones of prehistoric horses. Dr. Hultin contacted the paleontologist and, through him, was put in contact with Lutheran missionaries who helped him get church records from Alaskan villages in 1918. The records, Dr. Hultin said, told him ”who died, what they died from, how fast they died, and where they were buried.”
Then he found the permafrost line on a map and found three villages that filled his criteria. In 1951, with some money from the university, he made his first trip to Alaska, looking for frozen flu victims. The first two gravesites he visited were unsuitable, he said. The ground had thawed in the 33 years since the 1918 flu. But the third site, in the village of Brevig on the Seward Peninsula, seemed ideal. Eighty people lived there in 1918, and when the flu struck, 72 died in one week. Missionaries buried them in a mass grave marked with two large wooden crosses.
In June 1951, Dr. Hultin got permission from village authorities to exhume the bodies. He began to dig, working 16 to 18 hours a day by himself, thawing the ground by building fires on it. When he had dug down six feet, he said, he found the body of a little girl.
She had ”beautiful black braided hair and a beautiful dress on,” Dr. Hultin said. He called three colleagues at Iowa State, who flew into Brevig to help. Together, they enlarged the hole Dr. Hultin had dug and removed lung tissue from five bodies. Then they closed the grave and returned to Iowa with their tissue. Dr. Hultin said that he and his colleagues wore gloves and masks but added that their protective gear ”today might be called primitive.”
”I worked a month and a half on those specimens, using all conceivable ways of trying to revive the virus.” Dr. Hultin said. ”But I failed. The virus was dead. He eventually moved to California and practiced as a pathologist, continuing to dream of tracking down the 1918 flu virus.
But it was only last year that he was able to act. Retired and living in San Francisco, Dr. Hultin read an article by Dr. Taubenberger in March in the journal Science that led him to believe that molecular biology had advanced enough so that it might be possible to get flu virus out of the people buried at Brevig.
Dr. Taubenberger, the chief of the division of molecular pathology at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, works in a windowless building, originally built as a bomb shelter in 1950, on the campus of the Walter Reed Medical Center. His job is to analyze tissue specimens for the Defense Department. A few years ago, he was given the difficult task of looking for viruses in severely rotted tissue taken from dead dolphins to determine why they died. Defense Department scientists suspected the dolphins had been killed by a measles-like virus rather than a red tide as had originally been suggested
Three years ago, Dr. Taubenberger discovered how to find the viruses in the decayed dolphin tissue, and that gave him an idea: he might be able to use the same technique to find the 1918 flu virus. There was a very slight chance, he realized, that traces of the virus might still be present in scraps of tissue saved from flu victims.
Ever since the Civil War, the pathology institute has been saving autopsy specimens, keeping them in ever-expanding warehouses. The collection is a Library of Congress of pathology — a record of every illness or death the military doctors have examined.
Dr. Taubenberger said he wondered if the warehouse contained lung tissue taken from soldiers who died in the 1918 epidemic and, if it did, if any of that lung tissue contained the genetic material of the flu virus that he could extract and analyze. He decided to search for the most likely victims, those who had died quickest, with the flu virus presumably abundant in their lungs.
He found 70 cases that seemed promising and requested their autopsy tissues. Within two days he got them, scraps of lung tissue soaked in formaldehyde and encased in chunks of paraffin about the size of a thumbnail and about a half inch thick.
Dr. Taubenberger and his colleague Ann Reid, took a razor blade and shaved off pieces of tissue from the paraffin blocks for molecular analysis. Within the first 30 samples they analyzed, they found one with footprints of the 1918 virus. The lung tissue was taken from Roscoe Vaughan, a 21-year-old private at Fort Jackson, S.C., who reported to sick call on Sept. 19, 1918, and died a week later.
Last year, Dr. Taubenberger and his colleagues published a report of their initial analysis of the virus in Private Vaughan’s lungs in the journal Science. And that was the article that caught the eye of Dr. Hultin.
In August, Dr. Hultin asked Dr. Taubenberger if he would like him to return to the Alaskan village and dig the gravesite again.
”I remember it was on a Monday that we had a conversation and we said we thought he should do it,” Dr. Taubenberger said. ”He said he didn’t think he could leave before Friday.”
Dr. Hultin said the reason for the three-day delay was that he had been finishing a replica of a 14th-century Norwegian log cabin in the Sierras. ”I didn’t want to tell Jeffrey that,” Dr. Hultin said. ”He might think he was dealing with a nut.” Dr. Hultin left that Friday, taking tools, camera and film. He did not take the time to seek financing from any foundation or government agency.
”I was so anxious to do the work that I wanted to remove all conceivable obstacles,” Dr. Hultin said. He said he did not want to repeat the experience of a proposed expedition to exhume Norwegian miners who died in the 1918 flu and were buried above the permafrost line. That expedition has been in the planning stages for more than three years and involves an international team.
Dr. Hultin arrived at Brevig last August, spoke to the village officials and got permission to dig, slept on an air mattress on the floor of the local school, and accepted the offer of four young men in the village to help him dig. On the third day, at 3 P.M., Dr. Hultin said, they came upon the first body, six feet down. But the tissue had rotted, which Dr. Hultin said he suspected was a consequences of his digging in 1951. The next day, at a depth of seven feet, they came upon four bodies with soft tissue left on them. One, the body of an obese woman, was particularly well preserved.
”I sat on this pail and saw this woman.” Dr. Hultin said. ”She was in a state of good preservation, her lungs were good. And I knew that this is where the virus would be.”
Dr. Hultin removed her lungs and also took tissue from the lungs of the three other victims, even though he doubted that their decaying tissue would contain virus particles. He put the tissues in a preservative and closed the grave. To make sure the tissues reached Dr. Taubenberger, Dr. Hultin made four packages, each containing tissue from all four victims. He mailed them on subsequent days using Federal Express, United Parcel Service and the Postal Service.
Dr. Hultin said he was not worried that he might be sending tissue containing live viruses. ”I tried to grow the virus under very good laboratory conditions in 1951 and it was not possible,” he said. ”The virus was dead. So I was not concerned.”
Dr. Hultin estimated that the entire trip, including paying his helpers, had cost him $3,200.
In the meantime, Dr. Taubenberger and his colleagues had found fragments of the flu virus in another of the pathology specimens that they had ordered from the warehouse. This was from a 30-year-old man, Pvt. James Downs, who died of the flu in Camp Upton, N.Y., on Sept. 26, 1918, three days after he became ill.
Now, Dr. Taubenberger and his colleagues have virtually completed analyzing 1 of the virus’s 10 genes, the hemagglutinin gene. The virus uses the gene to make a protein that allows it to stick to the surface of lung cells, Dr. Taubenberger said. One hypothesis, based on what happens with some flu viruses that strike birds, is that the 1918 flu became deadly because a particular area of the hemagglutinin gene, the cleavage site, was altered. But Dr. Taubenberger saw no such alteration.
”Our goal is to get the sequence of all of the genes,” Dr. Taubenberger said.
He says he thinks there will be evidence in the genes that will show why the virus was deadly. And he also hopes that by comparing the genetic sequence of the 1918 flu virus to other viruses that infect birds and pigs, scientists will be able to discover whether the virus came from birds, pigs or both. So far, he said, the virus does not look like a bird virus.
Other flu experts say they are delighted by Dr. Taubenberger’s work. Having three viruses from people who died in three different places strengthens the conviction that the viral genes are indeed those of the 1918 flu and not just an innocuous bystander virus that happened to be in the lungs of the first victim, said Dr. Edward D. Kilbourne, a flu researcher at New York Medical College in Valhalla.
The work, Dr. Kilbourne said, is ”a great combination of good epidemiology and very good molecular biology.”
Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of the influenza branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said the work was ”extremely interesting and quite important.” And she said, ”We’re all delighted that he’s been able to get three viruses.”
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER GENETIC MATERIAL FROM SPANISH FLU THAT KILLED MILLIONS
A group of Defense Department researchers has found genetic material from the notorious Spanish flu virus that killed at least 20 million people in the influenza pandemic of 1918.
Fragments of the virus were found lurking in a formaldehyde-soaked scrap of lung tissue from a 21-year-old soldier at Fort Jackson, S.C., who died of the flu nearly 80 years ago. And now, medical experts say, investigators at last hope to answer a question that has troubled them for decades: what made this virus so deadly?
One part of the answer is that the Spanish flu virus passed from birds to pigs and then to humans, a mode of transmission that is thought to produce the most dangerous strains of influenza viruses.
Indeed, fear of a swine flu epidemic in 1976 caused President Ford to mobilize the nation to immunize iagainst a flu strain that infected soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J. That particular virus, however, turned out not to be a threat.
The search for the 1918 virus is of more than historical interest, said Dr. Jeffrey K. Taubenberger at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, the leader of the team whose report is being published today in the journal Science.
Taubenberger and other researchers hope that understanding the genetic code of the Spanish flu virus might help scientists prepare for the next influenza pandemic, which many scientists think is coming soon.
The Spanish flu epidemic seems to have begun in the United States in late spring and early summer of 1918, when doctors reported scattered outbreaks in military installations where recruits were reporting for training before going to France to fight in World War I.
By September, when schools opened, the epidemic was roaring through the entire population and spreading rapidly to every corner of the world, attacking the young and healthy and killing them, often within days.
The flu virus itself is gone, vanished with the epidemic. But scientists have repeatedly tried to find traces of it, studying autopsy specimens and even exhuming bodies buried in Alaska where, they hoped, the virus would have remained preserved. Even now, an expedition is being proposed to Spitsbergen, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean about 400 miles north of Norway, to exhume the bodies of miners who died of the flu.
Dr. Robert Webster, chairman of viral and molecular biology molecular biology, scientific study of the molecular basis of life processes, including cellular respiration, excretion, and reproduction. The term molecular biology was coined in 1938 by Warren Weaver, then director of the natural sciences program at the Rockefeller at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., said an epidemic like that of 1918 “can come again, and it will.”
Dr. Joshua Lederberg, geneticist and Nobel laureate who is president emeritus of Rockefeller University in New York, called influenza “the most urgent, patently visible, acute threat in the world of emerging infections.” And, Lederberg added, “the sooner we can learn what to anticipate, the more likely we will be able to blunt the next appearance” of a deadly flu virus.
Taubenberger studied specimens from Spanish flu victims that are among the millions of autopsy specimens that the pathology institute has been storing in warehouses since the Civil War.
For Part 2, go here.
Diamond, I will be following this very closely. As a very young child,I remember my mother speaking of the flu epidemic of 1918. She had the flu and it left her hearing impaired. I was so young at the time that I can’t remember too much of what the adults were recalling about this to each other except that her fiancee at the time(later my father) was getting ready to be shipped to France to serve in WWl, and because of her tender age and her illness they could not be married before he left. Amazing what sticks in a young child’s mind when he/she is sitting around the fireplace with the family (before tv came along) on a cold winter night telling stories and remembering tragedies, along with happy remberances. The young of today have missed so much by not having these expierences.
I am of two minds about the wisdom of this quest to find the bug. While it could be valuable in helping to provide a vaccine, it could also be very dangerous.
Sorry about the double post. Went back to correct my spelling not realizing that the comment had already taken.
Amazing, this morning we had 12 cases in US, now 20,
and Homeland Security is involved?
WAKE UP AMERICA!!!
Lee,
Finding the virus could only lead to 1 thing, I am sure; use as a biological agent. We’ve had access to many viruses for years (HIV, HPV, etc.) and haven’t been able to cure them yet. While the scientists may be doing this for “pure” reasons, I can guarantee you the government is not.
Diamond’s reaction to Tim’s comment about the Mexican archaeologist dying after shaking Obama’s hand may not have been too far off the mark.
NoQuarterUSA has an article today on this. They have some tips on preventing contamination, mostly universal precautions. Everybody should keep your immune system healthy. Eat nutritionally, get exercize, take vitamins,etc. That’s just the nurse in me talking. But, if you have a healthy immune system the chances are better that you can fight off any disease. Avoid large crowds. EXCEPT TEA PARTIES!
BTW Diamond Tiger, many thanks for this very enlightening series and the time you are putting into it. I know it must be very time consuming.
There was some speculation that those who lived through the flu epidemic of the early 20th century (1918, according to Lee) were at risk for Parkinson’s disease as a result. My father was born in 1909 and I don’t know if he had the flu. I do know that as a youth he worked in a dye factory and came down with TB before he went to college…Later that TB actually came back in the mid-1970’s….his Parkinson’s had been diagnosed about 10 years earlier.
Who knows what lurks over many years…
In the comments in the prior post, I saw the reference to Roche and added some links…
Here is another one…Roche’s R & D page…Click on
http://www.rocheusa.com/r&d/index.html
and here are the Disease Biology Centers..
http://www.rocheusa.com/r&d/centers.html
no-nonsense nancy; No Quarter’s advice might kill you.
Keeping your immune system healthy may actually be what kills you if this flu is anything like the 1918 virus. It was not the virus that killed. It was the body’s nearly nuclear response. Lungs filling with fluid etcetera killed seemingly healthy people. The elderly and the very young, who traditionally have weaker immune systems were dying at a much lower rate.
The same death pattern has been seen in Mexico. The healthy died the elderly and young survived. It remains be seen whether it was an immune response issue, or whether people were given a degree of protection from this year’s flu shot.
You might just want to pick up a cold before you get the flu.
Shtuey is correct about your own body’s immune system going hogwild and overcompensating. The best thing to do at this point is go over to MsPlacedDemocrat and read about the precautions you can take. If you are really worried, buy a painter’s “respirator” with blue filters, NOT the little paper cups. It will run you about $30 at Home Depot.
Swine Flu Precautions:
http://msplaceddemocrat.com/http:/msplaceddemocrat.com/swine-flu-precautions/
Not to sound stupid, but I am fairly new to this blog. What does AYFKM stand for?
Are You Freakin’ Kidding Me?????
GRL,
If you go to the home page, you can get Roche’s Pandemic Planning Tool Kit!
My father would speak of his mother, who died during the 1918 outbreak. He said she made my breakfast, I went to school when I came home she had died. She was 32 years old and as far as I can tell healthy. She left behind 3 young children to an alcoholic father.
I do not know if the people who are tinkering with this are on the side of good or evil but no matter what the original intentions there is always the other side who are up to not good.
NO FRAKKIN’ TINKERING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ah, I feel better now.
Only problem is, humans are humans and they like to take things apart and put them back together in different combinations. We need K’nex for adults!
Kathy,
It’s similar to Artificial Intelligence; (waving to Eliezer Yudkowsky!) no matter what your intentions, there are no possible good outcomes. Pandemics since 1918 have all been due to “science” tinkering with nature. We’d be at zero risk if these viruses weren’t messed with, and we weren’t vaccinated and subjected to system-weakening conditions by our “protectors” in government and health care.
So I guess now we sit back and wait to see how bad this gets. But how do we figure out who are the bad guys in this , the videos seem to suggest China would benefit from this but how would they keep themselves from being affected. As with Mexico if there was an outbreak in China the rates of infection would move very quickly.
If it is TPTB and they want to reduce the population they will do nothing to help.
I need to find reruns of the X-Files.
If you watched the videos Kathy then you know that China is where the vaccines (and likely the antidotes) are being developed. Besides, anyone that can be so callous about killing millions wouldn’t mind losing a few of their own as collateral damage as long as the elites are protected.
Does anyone else remember at the time of the first Gulf War talk about Saddam’s underground bunkers? If a two bit hoodlum like Hussein I could do that, why would we think TPTB can’t?
So I guess that means China and TPTB are working together on this? Sorry to sound so dense I am just trying to connect dots.
I don’t know if they are actually working with the Chinese, or just using them as a way to reach their goals (like the Muslims). The latter is my guess.
go here: http://www.fluwikie.com/
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/printerfriendlynews.php?newsid=51913
Vitamin D may provide protection against the flu.
If the name of the 1918 virus is h1n1 and the 2009 is also h1n1 why aren’t they the same?I was understanding that the n is used to enter the blood cell anmd the h is to exit so infection can spread.
Chris, I will explain the whole H,N business in part 3 which is coming either today or tomorrow (early). The actual DNA/RNA is the same type but not the same markers – like everybody has dna but it is all different. I will also explain how H1N1 flipped to H5N3 from the first to 2nd waves of the 1918 Spanish Flu (in such a way that we all can understand it, okay?)
I believe that for every confirmed case there are probably hundreds of unconfirmed ones.What do you think?