Scientists have made from scratch the Spanish flu virus that killed as many as 50 million people in 1918, the first time an infectious agent behind a historic pandemic has ever been reconstructed.I believe the statement "People around the world developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today" is far less reasuring than it sounds. How many people are alive today who survived the 1918 pandemic? Further it is highly unlikely that these survivors passed their acquired immunity on to their progeny.
Why did they do it? Researchers say it may help them better understand -- and develop defenses against -- the threat of a future worldwide epidemic from bird flu.
"The effort to understand what happened in 1918 has taken on a new urgency," said Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger of the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who led the team.
The public health risk of resurrecting the virus is minimal, U.S. health officials said. People around the world developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today.
The viral recreation, announced Wednesday, is detailed in the journal Science.
About 10 vials of virus were created, each containing about 10 million infectious virus particles, Tumpey said.
The real protection from this recreated virus will not be this supposed immunity but the security that is surrounding these 10 vials. Hopefully these samples are kept well-secured in secure laboratories and not shipped around the county or left where people can be exposed to them or where unauthorized persons can access them.
It's certainly a great and impressive step for science and it will hopefully lead to better protection from the various influenza virii.
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