Lethal Virus Comes Out of Hiding
By GINA KOLATA
Published: Tuesday, February 24, 1998
New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/24/science/lethal-virus-comes-out-of...

DEEP in a freezer in a closet-sized room at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology here are tiny vials of a clear liquid containing irreplaceable molecules. They are submicroscopic shards of one of the most deadly viruses the world has ever known, the influenza virus that swept the world in 1918.

The viral fragments come from the lungs of three victims of that epidemic: a soldier who died in South Carolina, one who died in New York and an Eskimo woman who died in a village on the northern coast of Alaska. They may be all that is left of that terrifying microbe.

But scientists treasure them for more than their historic value. If the virus strain ever emerges again, the fragments may be the crucial tools needed to save the world from a lethal epidemic.

Already scientists are analyzing the fragments, which may enable them to make a vaccine against the 1918 flu and to study whether current antiviral drugs would be effective against it, said Dr. Robert Webster, the head of the department of virology and molecular biology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. With luck, he said, scientists will learn why the 1918 flu was so deadly and where it came from. The answers will solve one of the great medical mysteries.

How the virus fragments were found is a detective story that began 50 years ago when a Swedish pathologist came to the United States and became obsessed with finding the virus that caused the 1918 epidemic, and ended last year because a young molecular biologist working for the Defense Department had discovered how to find viruses in the decayed tissue of dolphins.

The pathologist, Dr. Johan V. Hultin, now 72, an adventurer who thought nothing of working up to 18 hours a day in the Alaskan cold in the quest, and the biologist, Dr. Jeffrey K. Taubenberger, 36, whose fascination with the actual viral genes was so complete that he never took a 10-minute drive to see where the tissue specimens were stored, combined their efforts to identify the 1918 virus that killed 20 million to 40 million people. Dr. Hultin produced crucial evidence when he traveled to the remote Alaskan village to exhume the body of the Eskimo whose still-frozen lungs contained molecular footprints of the virus.

Not since the Black Death of the 14th century had the world seen an epidemic like the 1918 flu, which killed 675,000 people in this country, and 43,000 United States servicemen. About half of the deaths of United States servicemen in World War I were caused not by battle but by the flu. Young healthy people would fall ill and die within a few days.

Families were ravaged. James D. H. Reefer of Kansas City wrote to the flu researchers to tell them that when he was 4 years old and his brother was 6 that his 30-year-old father and his 27-year-old mother got the flu and died within a few days of each other, unable to breathe as the virus destroyed the air sacs of their lungs. ''Older members of the family later told me they simply drowned,'' Mr. Reefer recalled.

Ever since that 1918 epidemic, medical experts have lived in dread that the virus would re-emerge and hoped that if it did, they would be able to recognize and fight it. But for that, they needed to know what made it so deadly.

Although the 1918 flu was the most dangerous in recorded history, influenza pandemics seem to sweep the world every 30 years or so. The last one was the Hong Kong flu in 1968, making the current effort particularly urgent, some say.

Dr. Hultin had been fascinated with the 1918 flu for most of his career. He came to the United States from his native Sweden in 1949 and later wrote his master's thesis on influenza epidemics at the University of Iowa, where he studied microbiology. He was particularly horrified by the flu's devastation of the Eskimos; at the epidemic's height, entire villages were wiped out overnight.

In 1950, while at the university in Iowa, Dr. Hultin overheard a visiting virologist say that the only hope of understanding the 1918 flu would be to find the virus in the bodies of victims who might have been buried in permafrost, ground so cold it never thawed. Dr. Hultin saw an opportunity. The summer before, he had driven to Alaska for adventure and met a paleontologist, working with him in a search for bones of prehistoric horses. Dr. Hultin contacted the paleontologist and, through him, was put in contact with Lutheran missionaries who helped him get church records from Alaskan villages in 1918. The records, Dr. Hultin said, told him ''who died, what they died from, how fast they died, and where they were buried.''
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/24/science/lethal-virus-comes-out-of...