page_title: Spanish flu research
section_title: Discovery of viral genomes
hierarchical_section_title: Spanish flu research / Discovery of viral genomes
caption_attribution_description: English: This 2005 photograph of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Dr. Terrence Tumpey, one of the organization’s staff microbiologists and a member of the National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID), showed him examining reconstructed 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus inside a specimen vial containing an orange-colored supernatant culture medium. Dr. Tumpey, here seen in a Biosafety Level 3-enhanced laboratory setting, was working beneath a flow hood, which pulls air from outside the hood into the hood’s confines, and is then filtered of any pathogens before being re-circulated inside the self contained laboratory atmosphere. Dr. Tumpey recreated the 1918 influenza virus in order to identify the characteristics that made this organism such a deadly pathogen. Research efforts such as this, enables researchers to develop new vaccines and treatments for future pandemic influenza viruses. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic was caused by an influenza A (H1N1) virus, killing more than 500,000 people in the United States, and up to 50 million worldwide. The possible source was a newly emerged virus from a swine or an avian host of a mutated H1N1 virus. Many people died within the first few days after infection, and others died of complications later. Nearly half of those who died were young, healthy adults. Influenza A (H1N1) viruses still circulate today after being introduced again into the human population in the 1970s. Italiano: Maschera a pieno facciale e guanti in lattice. Scienziati del centro di ricerca CDC che lavorano sull'influenza in condizioni di bio sicurezza. Português: Máscara facial com insuflamento de ar. Cientista realizando pesquisa sobre o vírus influenza em altas condições de segurança biológica.
context_page_description: Spanish flu research concerns scientific research regarding the causes and characteristics of the "Spanish flu," a variety of influenza that in 1918 was responsible for the worst influenza pandemic in modern history. Many theories about the origins and progress of the Spanish flu persisted in the literature, but it was not until 2005, when various samples were recovered from American World War I soldiers and an Inuit woman buried in the Alaskan tundra, that significant research was made possible.
context_section_description: In 1995, Jeffery Taubenberger of the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), wondered if it might be possible to recover the virus of 1918 flu pandemic from the dried and fixed tissue of victims. He and his colleagues, tested 10 slides of tissue sample and 2 came out positive. Taubenberger, Ann H. Reid and Thomas G. Fanning were able to amplify short segments of the viral nucleic acid using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) . The results were published in the journal Science in March 1997 .
  On Aug. 20, 1997, Johan Hultin recovered samples of the 1918 influenza from the frozen corpse of a Native Alaskan woman buried for nearly eight decades in permafrost near Brevig Mission, Alaska. He brought the samples to a team in Rockville, Maryland led by Jeffery Taubenberger of the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). Brevig Mission lost approximately 85% of its population to the 1918 flu in November 1918. One of the four recovered samples contained viable genetic material of the virus. This sample provided scientists a first-hand opportunity to study the virus, which was inactivated with guanidinium thiocyanate before transport. This sample and others found in AFIP archives allowed researchers to completely analyze the critical gene structures of the 1918 virus.
  "We have now identified three cases: The Brevig Mission case and two archival cases that represent the only known sources of genetic material of the 1918 influenza virus," said Taubenberger, chief of AFIP's molecular pathology division and principal investigator on the project.
  The archived autopsy samples had been taken from WWI Army privates Roscoe Vaughan and James Downs.
  The 6 February 2004 edition of Science magazine reported that two research teams, one led by Sir John Skehel, director of the National Institute for Medical Research in London, another by professor Ian Wilson of The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, had managed to synthesize the hemagglutinin protein responsible for the flu outbreak of 1918. They did this by piecing together DNA from a lung sample from an Inuit woman buried in the Alaskan tundra and a number of preserved samples from American soldiers of the First World War. The teams had analyzed the structure of the gene and discovered how subtle alterations to the shape of a protein molecule had allowed it to move from birds to humans with such devastating effects.
  On 5 October 2005, Tumpey and other researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, announced that the (~13 kbp) genetic sequence of the 1918 flu strain, a subtype of avian strain H1N1, had been reconstructed using historic tissue samples and a small part of the RNA from a modern strain.
caption: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as Dr. Terrence Tumpey examines a reconstructed version of the 1918 flu.
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