Posted on 10/05/2005 8:08:58 PM PDT by Perdogg
The 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, has been reconstructed and found to be a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, two teams of federal and university scientists announced yesterday. It was the culmination of work that began a decade ago and involved fishing tiny fragments of the 1918 virus from snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died in the 1918 pandemic.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My pleasure.
The truth is, I was last of all -- I was going to post a similar story, but checked, and found all these others. Very nice to see the interest in such things by so many people.
That is NOT the reason the young died more than the older folks. The flu provoked an extreme reaction of the immune system. Younger people, who had healthier immune systems had their lungs destroyed by the over reaction of their immune systems. The older people got real sick, and recovered slowly.
Details can be found in John M Barry's book: "The Great Influenza"
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