BOSTON -- The Asian bird flu feared for its potential to start a worldwide health catastrophe shares key features with the 1918 Spanish flu that killed as many as 50 million people worldwide, according to research published this week.
A reconstruction of the chemical makeup of the deadly Spanish flu virus suggests that some samples of the bird flu have developed genetic changes that may allow it to spread from person to person, said Jeffery Taubenberger, a microbiologist at the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
The avian flu has killed at least 65 people in Asia who contracted the virus from contact with domestic or wild fowl. Health officials fear a global epidemic may arise if the virus becomes contagious among people. That's because humans don't have a natural immunity to the so-called H5NI virus, health officials have said.
The virus "might be going down a similar path to 1918," Taubenberger said. His research is being published in the journal Nature.
"The effort to understand what happened in 1918 has taken on a new urgency," said Taubenberger.
President Bush said earlier this week that concern about a pandemic is one reason he would like to give the military more power to respond to disasters.
"I take this issue very seriously," Bush said. "I'm not predicting an outbreak; I'm just suggesting to you we better be thinking about it, and we are."
Modern flu outbreaks studied
Taubenberger and his team extracted fragments of DNA from frozen tissue and from autopsy specimens of soldiers killed by the Spanish flu. Using techniques that enabled U.S. researchers to decipher the entire human genome in 2001, his lab identified the sequence of chemical units in genes from the Spanish flu.
A living reconstruction of the 1918 virus showed that it was extremely deadly in mice, said Terrence Tumpey, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention senior microbiologist, who led a second study published in Science.
"It induced tremendous inflammation," one reason the virus was so deadly, he said.
Three worldwide outbreaks of flu occurred in 1918, 1957 and 1968. While all three may have been caused at least partially by viruses from animals, the 1918 flu, by far the most deadly, may have started when a bird virus acquired genetic changes allowing for human-to- human spread, Taubenberger said.
By contrast, the 1957 pandemic that killed about 70,000 Americans and the 1968 "swine flu" that killed about 34,000 probably emerged when a human and bird virus exchanged genes. The presence of genes from the human virus gave the human immune system some ability to recognize the flu and fight it off, he said.
"We all recognize and are very focused on the potential for a pandemic outbreak of influenza," said Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the briefing. "Most experts agree it's not a question of 'if,' it's a question of 'when."'
Bloomberg News
VIRUS BACK TO LIFE
RESURRECTED: Scientists have re-created the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed as many as 50 million people.
WHAT SCIENTISTS FOUND: The reconstruction suggests that some samples of today's bird flu have developed genetic changes that may allow it to spread from person to person.
THE RISK: The danger of resurrecting the virus is minimal because people developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today.
AP
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