Scientists Re-Create 1918 Flu

By Mike Stobbe< Associated Press<

ATLANTA – Scientists have made from scratch the Spanish flu virus that killed as many as 50 million people in 1918, the first time an infectious agent behind a historic pandemic has ever been reconstructed.

Research-ers say it might help them better understand the threat of bird flu.

Like the 1918 virus, the current avian flu in Southeast Asia occurs naturally in birds. In 1918, the virus mutated, infected people and spread among them. The current Asian virus has killed at least 65 people but has rarely spread person-to-person.

But viruses mutate rapidly and it could soon develop infectious properties like those seen in the 1918 bug, said Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger of the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

“The effort to understand what happened in 1918 has taken on a new urgency,” said Dr. Taubenberger, who led the gene-sequencing team.

The virus recreation, announced Wednesday, is detailed in the journal Science. The completion of the gene sequencing was announced in the journal Nature.

The virus was made from scratch but based on a blueprint from Alaska. In previous research, scientists concluded that modern antiviral medicines are effective against Spanish flulike viruses.

About 10 vials of virus were created, each containing about 10 million infectious virus particles, Terrence Tumpey, the CDC research scientist who assembled the virus, said in an interview with The Associated Press. More might be created to accommodate researchers’ future needs, he said.

The virus particles are being stored at the CDC, and there are no plans to send samples off campus, said Dr. Julie Gerberding, the agency’s director.

The Spanish flu of 1918 was a terrible pandemic. In a few months, it killed more people than any other illness in recorded world history: an estimated 20 million to 50 million worldwide, including roughly 550,000 in the United States.

Virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin- Madison and the University of Tokyo called the work important.

“We need to understand why this virus was so pathogenic,” he said. “If there was any concern about safety, the experiment would not have been approved.”