Duncan Influenza In 1918

The Spanish Flu of 1918 was an influenza that swept the globe killing more people then World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. The virus’s victims were between the ages of nineteen and twenty eight, an unusual range compared to expected ages of deaths from a normal flu. The Forsete, a ship that set sail from Norway’s northern coast, was hit with an outbreak of the Spanish Flu on September 21, 1918. Within the next two weeks, seven people died, and were buried in Longyearbyen, the arrival site of the Forsete. Kristy Duncan, a Canadian Geographer, set up an expedition to go to the grave site of these seven men in Longyearbyen. These men may very well be intact, cryogenically preserved, and may still be carrying
What she hopes to find is a live virus of the Spanish Flu; if they do not find the virus, she hopes that they can at least recover the virus’s genetic footprint or the RNA residue. This sample will then be compared to every major influenza sample in the world’s virological centers. No one ever kept a sample of the virus in 1918, so the only way to know more about the virus, is to find the virus. The first case of the Spanish Flu occurred on March 4, 1918 in Kansas. In only one month the flu had spread to almost all of America and Europe, but quickly subsided. A month later the flu resurfaced, mutated, and had become a killer. The virus then spread virtually all over the world killing between twenty and forty million people. Normal influenzas infect the inner lining of the respiratory tract damaging the air-filled cells of the lungs known as alveoli. The Spanish Flu was much worse making the lungs very hard and red. This flu was causing people to drown by filling the alveoli with fluid. Patients would suffer from cyanosis or discoloration of the skin and would have mahogany spots on their cheek bones that sometimes spread all over the
Taubenberger suspects that the Spanish Flu came about from a bird flu, pig flu, and human flu all getting mixed together somehow, but could not tell from his sample what makes the flu so deadly. He agreed to join Duncan’s team in hopes of making sense of the Spanish Flu. Every winter, the Food and Drug Administration make sure we are prepared if such a strain of the flu ever reappears. With guidance of the government, they find the kinds of flu strands to put in the upcoming flu shot. Whenever a flu strand produces a new offspring, scientists say the virus has “drifted”; this drifting is what makes the flu so dangerous, and also makes it impossible to use the same vaccination. We are relying on a certain surveillance process to protect us if the Spanish Flu ever reappeared, and if certain flu strands don’t fall into specific “families” it would sound an alarm. On May 10th, 1997, a boy in Hong Kong was infected with a pure avian flu that had never been seen in humans before, possibly caused by direct contact with infected