PARIS (AFP) — Scientists testing a resurrected version of the 1918 flu virus on lab mice believe the 20th-century’s deadliest pathogen reaped its toll through a combination of runaway tissue inflammation and cell death. The so-called Spanish flu that swept parts of the world at the end of World War I claimed, by some estimates, as many as 40 million or 50 million lives — nearly three times more than the 1914-18 conflict itself.
The H1N1 virus could take someone in robust good health and put him in his grave in just three or four days, wrecking lung tissue with such efficiency that the patient would sometimes drown in his own blood. In an experiment never seen before in medicine, US researchers went to Alaska to recover tissue samples from a woman victim of Spanish flu whose body had been preserved in permafrost. Teasing out fragments of the virus, they …
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