When it came to treating influenza patients in the 1918 pandemic, doctors, nurses and druggists were at a loss. [Credit: Office of the Public Health Service Historian]
In 1918, when the Great War had just ended, American children could be heard singing this rhyme across the country. It referred to the other great tragedy of the time period – the flu pandemic known as “Spanish influenza”. In one year alone, Spanish flu killed more people than four long years of war. In total, an estimated 40-50 million people died worldwide, one of the deadliest disease events in human history.
In 2005, scientists brought the 1918 flu virus back to life after recovering genomic RNA from the archived tissue samples of an Alaskan flu victim. An approach known as “reverse genetics” allowed researchers to generate a virus with the same genetic blueprint as the deadly Spanish flu. Studies of the resurrected virus in mice confirmed its extraordinary virulence. Researchers have also sequenced the entire genome of the 1918 virus. But the daunting challenge of stopping transmission of pandemic influenza remains huge.
