molecular sleuthing by military pathologists unearthed the first fragments of the genetic fingerprint of the virus behind the pandemic flu of 1918 that killed 20 million to 40 million people worldwide. The genetic mug shot, described in today's issue of Science , * could help health officials spot a re-emergence of the deadly virus and suggests that swine populations - the source of the virus -. Be closely monitored
The breakthrough came tissue kept private for 21 years of the military who died in the 1918 pandemic Looking for the culprit, pathologist Jeffery Taubenberger, a molecular biologist Ann Reid and their colleagues at the armed Forces Institute of pathology in Washington, DC, examined dozens of samples of lung tissue taken from soldiers and kept in the archives of the institute. Influenza virus stores its genetic information on single strands of RNA, which is highly sensitive to degradation. "We must therefore look for small pieces," says Taubenberger. Only in the lungs private-they find pieces of viral RNA. They amplify the RNA with the polymerase chain reaction, which provided enough to sequence . parts of the genetic code of the virus
So far, the killer virus resembles a swine flu run-of-the-mill, no avian virus that some virologists had suspected - leaving scientists to wonder why the strain was so deadly. as he continues to probe the viral RNA, Taubenberger wants to solve another mystery :. Why young adults, usually the most resistant to flu infections, were the hardest hit in 1918 by the swine flu
"what this says is we'd better watch what happens in swine populations in the world," says Robert Webster, a virologist at St. Jude Children's hospital in Memphis, Tennessee . He noted that the influenza virus constantly changing these animals are the source of new influenza viruses in humans. Currently, both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization devote most of their efforts to influenza surveillance to monitoring new strains of influenza in people, not animals.
Meanwhile, Taubenberger hopes other researchers combing their archives for more samples of the 1918 influenza virus may get his wish: A team led by Canada hopes to dig seven miners who are supposed to have died in the epidemic and were kept in their graves in the frozen ground near Spitsbergen, Norway. "We want to know what killed these people," says Webster. "The potential is there for this kind of virus to return."
* For details, Science subscribers online can create a link to the full text of the report.
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