THE 1918 flu infected virtually everyone on the planet within a year of its appearance. It made about a third of them sick, 3 per cent of whom died – and those are conservative estimates. So the virus killed at least 1 per cent of humanity.
In 1919 the killer disappeared – but now it is back, painstakingly reconstructed from hospital specimens and bodies preserved in Arctic permafrost. 51¶¯Âþs have rebuilt the 1918 virus and are studying it to see what made it so deadly (“Bird flu warning from replica virus ints at”). Without a doubt, this is a triumph for…
