![]() ![]() The bodies hadn't been buried deeply enough to keep them frozen. A few years ago, a similar enterprise, this time in Spitzbergen, also failed. In the 1950s, the bodies of four flu victims were disinterred from graves in the Alaskan permafrost, but attempts to grow the virus from tissue samples were unsuccessful. ![]() Kolata tells the story of the various attempts to track it down. Influenza viruses weren't identified until 1933, and the nature of the agent that caused the 1918 pandemic has been a mystery until recently. In England and Wales alone, official deaths from influenza numbered 200 000-more than the current annual number of deaths from heart disease. An estimated 25% of the world's population suffered a clinical infection, and global mortality may have been higher than 40 million. It's about the influenza pandemic that gripped the world in 1918, killing more people in a few months than the armies of the first world war slaughtered on the battlefields of Flanders, northern France, and Gallipoli in four years. ![]() ![]() If you think negative strand RNA viruses are giving us a bad time at the moment, read this book to recalibrate your perspective. ![]()
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