Scientists Determine Structure of 1918 Flu Virus

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."

Comments

Last Post!

[Undefined Parameter]

Just kidding. This is a really cool thing, and particularly relevent today because of the sudden expanse in outbreaks of bird flu around the world, today. When such a disease can suddenly and unexpectedly start killing and incapacitating humans in frightening numbers, it's a cause to celebrate when even a small part of that disease is newly known and understood. I took my flu shot, last year, and got sick from it. This year, I may take it again, just in case Hitchcock was a wee bit off in his depiction of the dangers posed by our avian friends. ;-) ~UP

Re:Last Post!

[Directrix1]

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.

Re:Last Post!

[zenyu]

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?

I thought it was caused more by social conditions

[GonzoDave]

postwar, rather than any inherent lethality

Just the Receptor

[stevesliva]

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.

Re:I thought it was caused more by social conditio

[isn't my name]

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.

What Sample?

[waldoj]

I read Gina Kolata's Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic] a couple of years ago, so I'm quite interested to find out from where the sample was acquired. Kolata describes a couple of efforts to extract samples, one from the body of a woman buried in a lead-lined coffin, another from the body of a miner buried deep under once-frozen tundra near the Arctic Circle, in North America. Neither panned out.

So, where'd they finally get the sample from?

-Waldo Jaquith

Re:What Sample?

[Randym]

...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.