http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/3446389.stm
Scientists are preparing to exhume the body of a woman who died of flu 85 years ago to find out how the virus killed millions across Europe.
Phyllis Burn died aged 20 in 1918, a victim of the 20th Century’s worst flu epidemic, which killed more than 50 million people.
So they know how to make a deadly flu now. Interestingly, the current flu is the same H1N1 as the spanish flu minus a few protein molecules.
If there’s a blessing in the current swine flu epidemic, it’s how benign the illness seems to be outside the central disease cluster in Mexico. But history offers a dark warning to anyone ready to write off the 2009 H1N1 virus.
The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 sickened an estimated third of the world’s population.
In each of the four major pandemics since 1889, a spring wave of relatively mild illness was followed by a second wave, a few months later, of a much more virulent disease. This was true in 1889, 1957, 1968 and in the catastrophic flu outbreak of 1918, which sickened an estimated third of the world’s population and killed, conservatively, 50 million people
To add fuel to the tinfoil fire. Read about the rash of untimely and strange deaths of microbiologists from Oct, 2001 to 2005 that worked in pandemic and bio-weapon research. About 1 every 25 days.
