The BBC reports that Canadian researchers have recreated the “Spanish Flu” virus of 1918… It killed an estimated 50 million people in the days when passenger airliners didn’t exist to spread the disease even faster.
They hoped to identify what made it so deadly so that a future pandemic might be avoided.
One of the widely talked about though perhaps rarely implemented disaster contingency plans for a flu pandemic is telecommuting which allows people to continue working (at home) while avoiding potential conflict with others who may spread the flu.
The preserved body of a flu victim buried in Alaskan permafrost was exhumed, and they painstakingly extracted the genetic material needed to work out the structure of the H1N1 virus.
Then, in a maximum “biosafety” facility at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory they reconstructed a fully functioning virus, and infected macaque monkeys to see what would happen…
Photo courtesty BBC
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