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Topic: Article from May 2001 reveal scientists recreating deadly 1918 flu! SARS related?
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Trafield
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Scientists recreating deadly 1918 flu virus
By Rick Wiles
May 2001
Copyright American Freedom News
http://www.americanfreedomnews.com/afn_articles/afn_1819flu.htm
Teams of scientists in the USA and Great Britain are working to recreate the virus responsible for the most deadly plague in recorded human history.
Between 20 million and 40 million people died worldwide in the 1918 outbreak of “Spanish flu.” Although the flu had nothing to do with Spain or World War I, the virus quickly spread around the world, attacking even strong and healthy humans. With the exception of Iceland and America Samoa, the deadly virus ravaged every place on Earth.
The first evidence of the virus in 1918 was an army camp in the US. Some scientists believe the virus was transported with US troops to France during World War I.
The epidemic came in two waves in the spring and fall of 1918. The fall wave produced a higher mortality rate. Many virologists believe the springtime virus acquired mutated and became even more deadly later that year.
The violent influenza ripped holes in the lungs of its victims. Their hands and feet turned black from a lack of oxygen. As the body fought for survival, the victims’ faces turned purple as they gasped for oxygen.
Now scientists want to bring the virus back – in the laboratory – to discover what made it so deadly.
That’s has some folks afraid the virus will escape and another plague will strike down possibly hundreds of millions of people the next time.
Professor John Oxford, of the Royal London Medical College, spearheaded the drive to recreate the virus. He began collecting in the mid-1990s tissue samples of people who died in the 1918 plague. Oxford believes genetic material extracted from the bodies of the victims will help scientists “resurrect” the virus.
He’s doing the research because scientists are expecting another worldwide flu plague anytime.
Oxford and his fellow scientist hope that be recreating the virus, and allowing it to infect human cells cultured in the laboratory, scientists will learn how to stop a future flu virus from killing so many people.
“We have go samples from 1918. We want to recreate the virus, look at it genetically and see if there was anything special about it,” Professor Oxford told the London Times in 1996. “We are only just beginning. We have identified the specimens. That has taken a year, to get eight lungs certified from people who died of influenza and not from anything else. We have also got eight brains from people who died of encephalitis lethargica which followed after in 1921-22,” the professor said.
Teams of scientists have searched permafrost burial grounds for the corpses of victims of the 1918 epidemic. Virus samples were taken from the bodies of six Norwegian coal miners who died in 1918 from the virus and were buried in the permafrost on Spitzbergen Island, inside the Arctic Circle.
The tissue samples taken from the remote gravesites are now kept in the US National Tissue Repository in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Washington. The lungs of other flu victims, preserved in paraffin wax in 1918, are also stored in AFIP and have been used to decode the virus’ DNA sequence.
The scientific project is making major strides in bringing back the virus. The US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has already worked out the sequence of two of the most important genes in the virus. The scientific team used materials from the institute’s tissue archives and from a woman who died of the flu and was buried in the Alaskan permafrost.
The London Times reported last year that a team led by Professor George Brownlee of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford has developed a method for recreating old viruses from DNA molecules.
“The technique is very simple,” Professor Brownlee said. “It involves adding 12 plasmids – rings – of DNA to a cell in tissue culture, and out pops a virus.”
Several months ago, scientists working on the project reported that their research has yet to reveal what made the virus so deadly in 1918. So far, they’ve been unable to find any signs of mutations or unusual properties in the genes taken from the flu’s DNA.
“What it says is that, once again, we don’t have a simple answer,” said Jeffery K. Taubenberger, a scientist at AFIP.
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