A descendant of the U.S. Army Medical Museum founded in 1862, the AFIP has grown along with the medical specialty of pathology and now has a collection of three million specimens. When we realized that these included autopsy samples from 1918 flu victims, we decided to go after the pandemic virus. Our initial study examined 78 tissue samples from victims of the deadly fall wave of 1918, focusing on those with the severe lung damage characteristic of patients who died rapidly. Because the influenza virus normally clears the lungs just days after infection, we had the greatest chance of finding virus remnants in these victims.

The standard practice of the era was to preserve autopsy specimens in formaldehyde and then embed them in paraffin, so fishing out tiny genetic fragments of the virus from these 80-year-old "fixed" tissues pushed the very limits of the techniques we had developed. After an agonizing year of negative results, we found the first influenza-positive sample in 1996, a lung specimen from a soldier who died in September 1918 at Fort Jackson, S.C. We were able to determine the sequence of nucleotides in small fragments of five influenza genes from this sample.

But to confirm that the sequences belonged to the lethal 1918 virus, we kept looking for more positive cases and identified another one in 1997. This soldier also died in September 1918, at Camp Upton, N.Y. Having a second sample allowed us to confirm the gene sequences we had, but the tiny quantity of tissue remaining from these autopsies made us worry that we would never be able to generate a complete virus sequence.

A solution to our problem came from an unexpected source in 1997: Johan Hultin, by then a 73-year-old retired pathologist, had read about our initial results. He offered to return to Brevig Mission to try another exhumation of 1918 flu victims interred in permafrost. Forty- six years after his first attempt, with permission from the Brevig Mission Council, he obtained frozen lung biopsies of four flu victims. In one of these samples, from a woman of unknown age, we found influenza RNA that provided the key to sequencing the entire genome of the 1918 virus.

More recently, our group, in collaboration with British colleagues, has also been surveying autopsy tissue samples from 1918 influenza victims from the Royal London Hospital. We have been able to analyze flu virus genes from two of these cases and have found that they were nearly identical to the North American samples, confirming the rapid worldwide spread of a uniform virus. But what can the sequences tell us about the virulence and origin of the 1918 strain? Answering those questions requires a bit of background about how influenza viruses function and cause disease in different hosts.

Flu's Changing Face

Each of the three novel influenza strains that caused pandemics in the past 100 years belonged to the type A group of flu viruses. Flu comes in three main forms, designated A, B and C. The latter two infect only humans and have never caused pandemics. Type A influenza viruses, on the other hand, have been found to infect a wide variety of animals, including poultry, swine, horses, humans and other mammals. Aquatic birds, such as ducks, serve as the natural "reservoir" for all the known subtypes of influenza A, meaning that the virus infects the bird's gut without causing symptoms. But these wild avian strains can mutate over time or exchange genetic material with other influenza strains, producing novel viruses that are able to spread among mammals and domestic poultry.

2 Comments

1. 1. detectorlam 08:54 AM 4/29/09

   This is very less mask in my country,i think USA and Mexico has been less more.
   
   
   Eric
   
   http://www.1gameconsole.com

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this

2. 2. jack.123 05:22 AM 4/10/10

   There's no mention ,if the first soldier survived? If he did might his descendants have some information in their genes?Or for that matter others as well?

   Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this