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Unearthing a deadly mystery

Broadcast Date: March 21, 1997

It's the question disease experts have been asking for decades: how did the Spanish flu kill so many, so fast – especially the young and healthy? After years of searching, a U.S. Army pathologist has isolated the first known sample of the notorious 1918 virus – in the lung tissue of a soldier killed during the First World War. In this clip, CBC Radio's Michael Enright discusses the implications of the landmark discovery and its significance for future research.

Unearthing a deadly mystery

• In 1997, Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C, became the first person to isolate the virus responsible for the Spanish flu pandemic.
• His discovery came after an examination of tissue samples taken from the bodies of U.S. servicemen who died of the flu in 1918.
• Since so little was known about microbiology in 1918, no one thought to preserve a sample of the virus for use in a vaccine of for future research.

• Taubenberger spent two years investigating the tissue samples. He eventually found the virus in lung tissue that was extracted from the body of a 21-year-old army private after his death on Sept. 26, 1918 - five days after he first reported his illness.
• In an interview on the website Microbe World, Taubenberger said that considering the looming risk of another flu pandemic "it seemed to us that it would be useful to know something about the worst one and use that as a model to study how influenza viruses do what they do."

• In a 1997 New Yorker article about influenza, writer Malcolm Gladwell called Taubenberger "one of the world's experts in the arcane art of recovering genetic information from preserved tissue samples."
• Taubenberger and his research team spent months painstakingly rebuilding the virus's RNA, or genetic structure, before they could begin their investigation.
• After reassembling 15 per cent of the RNA, the team was able to determine that the virus was an A type influenza. (Of the three types of influenza viruses, A, B and C, "A" poses the highest risk for humans.)

• They also confirmed that the virus originated in birds in the spring of 1918, likely as a result of duck feces that were shed over or near Camp Funston, an American military base in Kansas.
• Since the flu virus rarely jumps directly from birds to humans, Taubenberger concluded that the 1918 virus probably turned up in pigs first before it made the leap to humans. Pigs are considered the perfect conduit, since they possess both human and avian flu receptors.

• If a pig contracts both an avian flu, by say rolling in bird feces, and a human flu at the same time, scientists believe the two viruses can interact to create a new superbug. This so-called "viral sex" is believed to be responsible for the three influenza pandemics in the 20th century.
• Taupenberger also discovered that young healthy people who died of the flu, typically died much quicker – sometimes in a day or two – than older victims.
• The tissue samples were all preserved in formaldehyde or wax, meaning the risk of infection from the virus was non-existent.

• This was not the first time researchers attempted to locate the virus responsible for more than 40 million deaths. In 1951, a secret U.S. Army expedition headed to a gravesite in Alaska where they exhumed bodies from the 1918 pandemic.
• The mission was a failure though, because the bodies were not buried in permafrost, meaning they had decomposed.
• In August 1997, a Canadian-led team travelled to a remote village in northern Norway to examine the bodies of seven sailors who had died of the Spanish flu.

• Led by Toronto climatologist Kirsty Duncan, the team discovered the bodies preserved in permafrost, but tissue samples failed to turn up usable genetic material.
• In November 2005, researchers at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg announced they were planning to rebuild the 1918 virus from scratch in the hopes of finding out why it was so lethal.
• The announcement came weeks after U.S. scientists recreated the virus's DNA, which is now stored in a secured lab in Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Unearthing a deadly mystery

Medium: Radio

Program: As It Happens

Broadcast Date: March 21, 1997

Guest(s): Jeffrey Taubenberger

Host: Michael Enright

Duration: 5:53

Last updated:
Sept. 1, 2009