Letter: Flu Pandemics From the Sky

By Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe

Sir: The epidemiology of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic that caused over 20 million deaths leaves many puzzles unsolved. It is said to have been ‘detected in Boston and Bombay on the same day, but took three weeks before it reached New York City, despite the fact that there was considerable travel between the two cities’.

Such authoritative statements by Dr Louis Weinstein among others prompted the late Sir Fred Hoyle and myself to suggest in 1979 that an infective component of the virus came through the atmosphere, settling at ground level in a capricious manner. In such a scheme high-flying birds that sample large volumes of air would naturally present themselves as a first reservoir of a new strain of the virus, with humans becoming vulnerable at a later stage.

Fred Hoyle would have revelled at the recently reported discovery that the strain of flu reconstructed from victims of the 1918-1919 pandemic was exclusively avian, not a hybrid of an animal and a human flu virus. The sobering thought is that the next pandemic strain of ‘bird flu’ virus could fall from the skies.

PROFESSOR CHANDRA WICKRAMASINGHE

DIRECTOR, THE CARDIFF CENTRE FOR ASTROBIOLOGY CARDIFF UNIVERSITY