Researchers reconstruct killer 1918 flu virus

updated 7:24 p.m. ET Oct. 5, 2005

ATLANTA - It sounds like a sci-fi thriller. For the first time, scientists have made from scratch the Spanish flu virus that killed millions of people in 1918.

Why? To help them understand how to better fend off a future global epidemic from the bird flu spreading in Southeast Asia.

Researchers believe their work offers proof the 1918 flu originated in birds, and provides insights into how it attacked and multiplied in humans. On top of that, this marks the first time an infectious agent behind a historic pandemic has ever been reconstructed.

The scientists involved in the project contend there’s no real risk to public safety. The vials of this frightening germ — about 10 of them — are locked away at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said Terrence Tumpey, the CDC research scientist who constructed the virus.

However, at least one ethicist thinks there should be a broader public discussion before scientists take such bold steps.

“There isn’t much input from the public. I think there should be,” said Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics.

'A big day for science'
Like the 1918 virus, the current avian flu in Southeast Asia occurs naturally in birds. In 1918, the virus mutated, infected people and then spread among them. So far, the current Asian virus has infected and killed at least 65 people but has rarely spread person-to-person.

But viruses mutate rapidly and it could soon develop infectious properties like those seen in the earlier bug, said Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger of the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

“The effort to understand what happened in 1918 has taken on a new urgency,” said Taubenberger, who led the team that did the gene-sequencing for the project.

The research involved everything from excavation of human remains to application of the latest laboratory technology. “It’s the sort of story you could tell high school students to get them excited about science,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a vaccine specialist at Vanderbilt University.

“It is a big day for science,” said Schaffner, who was not involved in the project.

The Spanish flu of 1918 was a worldwide contagion that in a few months killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million worldwide, including roughly 550,000 in the United States.

In severe cases, victims’ lungs filled with fluid and they essentially drowned in a disease process that took less than a week. It was known for being particularly dangerous to young adults, a group usually less susceptible to flu complications than older people.

Some public health experts believe the virus was also devastating because of the malnutrition and poor living conditions that existed in that period at the end of World War I.

The reason the scientists believe their reconstructed virus poses no public health threat is that based on previous research, modern-day medicines are effective against the 1918 flu. And they think most people today are already at least partially immune.

The subtype of virus that caused the 1918 pandemic is now common, and so it would not be as unknown to the immune defense systems of people today. In other words, it would not be as deadly, said Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, microbiologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

“In each pandemic, it’s been a new subtype of virus,” not an existing one, said Garcia-Sastre who participated in the effort to reconstruct the virus.

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