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Scientists Determine Structure of 1918 Flu Virus

Posted by timothy on from the reconstruction-junction dept.

Elusive_Cure writes "NIMR scientists have solved an 85-year old riddle by determining the structure of the flu virus which jumped from birds to humans in 1918 killing more than 20 million people worldwide. This is the same virus that took more lives than World War I and became the largest and deadliest influenza outbreak in recorded history."

8 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Last Post! by Directrix1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can't get sick from the flu shot. But you can get sick from the flu (caught via usual transports) within the first two weeks of receiving your flu shot. What you said is a common misconception. Unless of course you just had an allergic reaction to it, which would've taken about 15 minutes to set in.

    --
    Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
  2. Re:Last Post! by zenyu · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can't get sick from the flu shot.

    But you can feel sick due to a flu shot, or any other vacination for that matter. The whole point is to mobilize your immune system against whatever you are getting vacinated for. So if you get a temperature, the sniffles, etc. That is perfectly normal. You are not sick if this is the flu shot, this response is what you want, it means that your immune system is now primed and ready to deal with the real thing.

    There are vacinations that really can make you sick and even kill you, like the most common form of the Polio vaccine and the only current form of the Smallpox vaccine. These use less potent relatives of the more dangerous virus to innoculate. This is good in that the vaccine is actually contagious so you get the people you missed innuculated too, and bad in that you end up killing or debilitating a bunch of people who might have otherwise lived happy lives. The flu vaccine uses killed virus so unless something went horribly wrong you will not have a colony living within you. Polio and Smallpox are so deadly that it is/was considered a good risk to use the more potent live vaccine. This is why our service members are instructed not to spend too much time with their significant others for a few weeks after they get some of their shots. Why risk killing people when you don't have to?

  3. Just the Receptor by stevesliva · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know nothing about microbiology, yet I know from NPR that only the structure of the receptor has been determined, not the entire gene sequence of the virus. Granted, I'm not sure if the receptor is what made it so virulent and deadly, but the rest of the virus is still unknown.

    --
    Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
  4. Re:I thought it was caused more by social conditio by isn't+my+name · · Score: 5, Informative

    I thought it was caused more by social conditions postwar, rather than any inherent lethality

    Actually, no. It was a particularly deadly virus that actually hit the adult population harder than children, unlike most influenza strains. The fact that there were troops being transported all over and then returning home probably helped to speed its spread, but given what I've read about it, a modern city today would be hit pretty hard by the 1918 flu.

  5. Re:What Sample? by Isbiten · · Score: 3, Informative

    From http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/

    Recently the virus has been reconstructed from the tissue of a dead soldier and is now being genetically characterized

    --
    I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
  6. Re:What Sample? by Randym · · Score: 5, Informative
    ...biopsies from soldiers who died from influenza in 1918 were preserved and maintained in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Another sample was taken from an Inuit woman who had succumbed to the infection and had been buried in the Alaskan permafrost. Together, these samples yielded a number of pieces of RNA from the virus. A few years ago, Taubenberger and his colleagues at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology were able to piece together enough fragments to reconstruct the sequence of the gene that coded for the viral protein hemagglutinin. These are the oldest viral sequences that have been reconstructed to date. Then Basler and Palese at Mount Sinai Institute of Medicine in New York managed to construct an expression system that allowed them to make the hemagglutinin protein. Finally, Wilson and Stevens developed their own systems and made enough of the protein to crystallize and solve the structure using x-ray crystallography.

    Gee, Waldoj, perhaps you should RTA (the second link, to the Scripps Institute). In fact *some* of the RNA *did* come from an Arctic tundra burial. But the final protein analysis was somewhat more complex.

    PS: Thanks for mentioning this book. I'm jotting it down and am going to search it out.

    --
    DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
  7. aka: spanish flu, pandemic by bgins · · Score: 3, Informative

    The CDC has a couple good pages on pandemics, of which the spanish flu was the worst in the 20th century.

  8. Double Infection is the really terrifying possibil by Guy_Warwick · · Score: 2, Informative

    I just listened to a microbiologist on the radio who compared the 1918 strain to the present situation.

    He warned that a double carrier of bird flu and regular flu could incubate a mutation of a kind that no one has any immunities to.

    There is some info in this New Scientist article on double infection

    http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9 99 94578

    PS for gods sake someone explain to this Moron what the html command is to format the above hyperlink