Scientists recreate 1918 Flu Virus

[Lady_Acoma]

Well in the short term yer ok. You have to hug an infected chicken to catch it right now.

But...but...I Love chickens!!!

 

[Del]

CNN just ran with an Outbreak Paranoia News Show.

I love network news, everything is cataclysmic.

 

[der_kluge]

All this "pandemic" stuff has raised the alarmist in my mother. She's greatly concerned for everyone. It's gonna kill millions, she said. She even went out and bought a ton of groceries so she could isolate herself in her house if she needed to.

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

Funny coincidence, I'm going to see a play called "Unity 1918", about that very virus.

AR

 

[Steve Jung]

Well in the short term yer ok. You have to hug an infected chicken to catch it right now.

But...but...I Love chickens!!!

Del said you have to hug a... oh.

 

[Shemeska]

Recreating it aside, you could probably find a viable sample of the virus if you were willing to attempt to find some bodies from the time period who died of the virus, exhume them and try to culture it, etc.

I want to say I read a paper about an attempt to do just that, but I don't recall where it was published.

It's also been a plot in at least one novel.

 

[Dark Jezter]

Didn't Stephen King's The Stand start out with a scenario similar to this?

 

[diaglo]

Recreating it aside, you could probably find a viable sample of the virus if you were willing to attempt to find some bodies from the time period who died of the virus, exhume them and try to culture it, etc.

that was actually part of the problem.

finding the people in records who had died from the flu. finding their remains. and then finding the virus in the remains.

it may sound doable on paper. but it was a very long drawn out process that took years.


many believe the 1918 flu was the cause of the end of WWI.

 

[Templetroll]

Wasn't this the basic idea behind "Jurassic Park"? Yeah, "...and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today."

 

[TurlinBlackwind]

funny, bird flu goin around again would be funny. It always freaked me out that there was mustard gas stored outside my home town, and the anthrax stored not far from that but Bird flu is an unexpected tweak on bio-fun
I mean terror