Bird flu virus killed 50 million, still evolving
Experts Unlock Clues to Spread of 1918 Flu Virus
The 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history’s most deadly epidemics, has been reconstructed and found to be a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, two teams of federal and university scientists announced yesterday.
It was the culmination of work that began a decade ago and involved fishing tiny fragments of the 1918 virus from snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died in the 1918 pandemic. The soldiers’ tissue had been saved in an Army pathology warehouse, and the woman had been buried in permanently frozen ground.
“This is huge, huge, huge,” said John Oxford, a professor of virology at St. Bartholomew’s and the Royal London Hospital who was not part of the research team. “It’s a huge breakthrough to be able to put a searchlight on a virus that killed 50 million people. I can’t think of anything bigger that’s happened in virology for many years.”
The scientists painstakingly traced the genetic sequence, synthesized the virus using tools of molecular biology…
The new studies could have an immediate impact by helping scientists focus on detecting changes in the evolving H5N1 virus that might make widespread transmission among humans more likely,” they said.
The bird flu viruses now prevalent share some of the crucial genetic changes that occurred in the 1918 flu, scientists said, but not all. The scientists suspect that with the 1918 flu, changes in just 25 to 30 out of about 4,400 amino acids in the viral proteins turned the virus into a killer.
Nah, I guess it was just Intelligently Designed.
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