Getting rid of the killer flu virus

By Gwynne Dyer

"June 9, 1918. In the trench, wrecked by last night's bombardment, all is quiet now; the artillery is taking a rest...A dozen conscripts were killed last night, their first night in the line. They are lying in a corner of the trench now, waiting to be moved to the rear for burial."

LONDON (JP): Arthur Lapointe, whose diaries are among the best French-language memoirs of World War I, was a lucky man. He served three years in the trenches, and survived the war without a scratch. Then he went home to Mont-Joli, Quebec -- and learned that all seven of his brothers and sisters had died of the Spanish influenza in the month before he arrived.

Eleven million people were killed in World War I. Between 20 and 40 million were killed by the "Spanish flu" in the autumn of 1918, and we have no assurance that the same thing could not happen again tomorrow. So at Longyearbyen in far northern Norway, they are opening up a frozen mass grave to see if they can find and identify the virus that did the killing.

"If we know the genetic structure of the virus, it can help us produce a vaccine," explained Dr. Tom Bergan of Oslo University -- and added: "There is no chance in the world that there is a viable virus in there." Nevertheless, the excavation is taking place under strict containment rules: an air-tight inflatable tent has been erected over the pit, and the scientists who enter through the air- lock wear "space-suits" with an outside air supply.

The three-week operation, which began on the 18th, aims to recover tissue samples from six Norwegian coal-miners who died of the Spanish flu in October, 1918. It is a triumph of medical detective work, for until now scientists had virtually given up hope of learning just what the 1918 virus was. Previous attempts to find remnants of it in Icelandic and Alaskan graves had produced disappointing results: the ground was too warm, and few traces of the virus survived.

Five years ago, however, Kirsty Duncan, a medical geographer at the University of Windsor in Ontario, discovered the 1918 diary of the chief engineer at the coal-mine on Spitzbergen Island, a glacier-covered Norwegian territory only 800 km. (500 miles) from the North Pole. It recorded the deaths of seven miners from the Spanish flu, and of their burial in the churchyard at Longyearbyen.

Duncan set about getting permission from their families to exhume the bodies, and finally six of the seven agreed. Last year she surveyed the grave with radar and determined that the bodies were well below the permafrost, preserved at a temperature between minus 10 and minus 1 Celsius (plus 14 to 30 Fahrenheit). So this year she has come back with a four-nation team of microbiologists, virologists and geologists to dig up the remains.

It will be up to 18 months before laboratory analysis of tissue samples from the miners yields a clear picture of the genetic structure of the 1918 virus, even if the team does recover it successfully. But already two conclusions seem likely: that it was a "shift" rather than a "drift" version of the influenza virus, and that it had the ability to attack the entire body rather than just the respiratory system.

The influenza virus, which affects birds and animals as well as humans, has the knack of changing its surface proteins in order to fool their immune systems. Normally, these are minor mutations in the virus's coat, occurring by a process known as "drift" -- and since most people have been exposed to similar strains before, we just feel rotten for a few days while our immune systems learn to deal with the new version. But sometimes, we are faced with a much bigger problem: "shift".

"Every few decades," explained Sir John Skehel of London's National Institute of Medical Research last December, "a completely new strain emerges. These emerge from animals, usually birds. The last time that happened was in 1968, when hundreds of thousands of people died in the resulting pandemic. Unfortunately, we are due for another major pandemic any time now."

Sir John was being interviewed about flu last year because we had a major scare in December: a new strain of the virus emerged in chickens in Hong Kong, and infected at least 20 people -- of whom four died. And as in 1918, most of the victims were young.

All 1.4 million chickens in Hong Kong were killed in 24 hours, and in the end the scare died down. This strain of the virus, it seems, can pass from chickens to people, but does not pass easily between humans. But some day, another version as virulent as the 1918 strain will emerge.

So it's good news that scientists are starting to learn what makes some flu viruses so much deadlier than others. Two virologists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Yoshihiro Kawaoka and Hideo Goto, report in this month's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have identified a flu virus that is able to infect any cell in the body, and not only those in the respiratory tract.

The strain they studied is one that first appeared in the late 1920s. It is thought to be closely related to the 1918 killer: its ability to cause infection in all body tissues and not just the lungs is precisely what researchers suspect made the Spanish flu so lethal. Now the Wisconsin team has identified the surface protein (haemagglutinin) that enables this particular strain to enter and infect cells throughout the body.

If the Longyearbyen team can reconstruct the "Spanish flu" virus, and if its trick was the same one that the Wisconsin researchers have identified in its 1920s relative, then we may never have to face another flu epidemic like the one in 1918. Otherwise, we are living on borrowed time.