Okay, it’s been a bad day so my thoughts naturally turn to one of my favorite subjects “how to destroy the world”. Now I know that the nucleic acid in viruses will start to degrade relatively quickly. However, I’m thinking there must have been some victims buried in Alaska or Greenland where the permafrost layer is maintained year round. Why couldn’t someone deliberately or otherwise unleash this virus back out onto an unsuspecting world?
if we could go back in time… would be be stricken by the virus’ of the time? or would be be relatively immune?
The problem with the Spanish flu of 1919ish wasn’t so much it’s plague like qualities (though it was a particullary easily spread varity) as the lack of anything to combat it with. Today’s drugs and general medical infrastructure would reduce it’s impact drastically.
In answer to the question of whether or not the strain is still viable after all these years cooped up with dead and rotting corpses, don’t know.
Well, to answer one irrelevant part of the question, there were scads and scads of victims among the unprotected Inuit. I have no idea if they bury their dead in the permafrost or not.
I believe (can’t find a cite) that a research team already tried the permafrost victims and found that there was no remaining sample of the pathogen (at least nothing that was still intact enough to study).
Yup. Someone’s playing with viral coat proteins from the 1918 strain right now
I just read about this in an old Malcolm Gladwell article saying that possible Inuit sources were failures, but that these seven bodies in Longyearbyen, Norway might be possible. Any word on what happened with them?
Russia
This has troubled me for some time.
The USSR was in enormous social upheaval during this era. Lot’s o permafrost there.
And they violated the Bioweapons Treaties six ways to Sunday.
You gotta wonder if somebody’s doing some grave robbing, perhaps as I type this…
The U.S. army has it from autopsies and from Alaska and ID’ed it’s genetics. It is related to the “Swine Flu”.
http://ireland.iol.ie/~afifi/BICNews/Health/health39.htm
One thing not noted in Squink’s excellent cite was that the UM_Team found antibodies in eldely survivors after 80 years
Robin Cook wrote a novel with that premise some time ago, but I couldn’t remember the title to save my life.
a couple things popped out while i was reading the various articles… from the BIC link this:
and then in the SciScoop link:
they directly contradict each other… however the BIC article is dated 9 February 1998, where as the SciScoop article is dated Fri Oct 8th, 2004
so perhaps the SciScoop article is more accurate.
Another thing that i noticed is in the Gladwell.com link:
and then in the SciScoop link:
This to me would seem to imply that the 1918 flu must have occurred before (albiet in a less lethal form) and that the elderly of 1918 were more immune to it.
Given that the Gladwell.com article said 70 - 74 y/o’s tended to fair the best… that would give an initial exposure date of around 1846. (assuming that said people were 2 years old when the initial exposure occured)
Any thoughts on that idea? Seems like a ripe area for research.
-Jester-
Nope. You’re thinking of John Case’s “The First Horseman”
(Basic premise: Fundie-Terrorists dig up buried victims of swine-flu from permafrost; Planning to re-invigorate and unleash same on sinful world)
A very chilling story, imo. I highly recommend it.
FWIW: Case’s “Genesis Code” predates the popular “Da Vinci Code” by several years, and is a better tale, (again, imo)
Fascinating link! Has anybody been able to explain how the 1919 virus got around the world so fast? As I recall, the disease broke out at a US Army camp in Kansas…and got to Europe via troops going to the front (in the fianl weeks of the war). But how on earth did it get to the remote Spitsbergen Archipelago? Longyearbyen is a coal mining town, and had perhaps 2-3000 people, Maybe a few coal freighters a year went there, yet the epidemic devasted the place. Even remote inut villages in Alaska and Greenland got the virus…although I read that American Samoa escaped the disease, by instituting a strict quarantine.
I’ve allso heard that the epidemic of heart disease first noticed in the late 1950’s (in middle-aged men) may have been the result of heart damage from the flue virus, when these men were children (in 1918-19).
as explained in a couple of the afore mentioned links, it was spread initially by the U.S. Army as they deployed for WWI. From there it was spread by boat to nearly every corner of the world.
A documentary on the flu from a few years back suggested that it traveled with the mail.
That would bring a whole new meaning to the phrase: “Going Postal”
Substantially correct.
THIS BOOK discusses a wave of (relatively) milder 1918, cropping up in Kansas, migrating to Europe, mutating into an even worse form, & returning to the US to wreak havoc.
However, this all happened in 1918.
Well, if it worked, it would give the NHL a good reasion to not award the stanley cup again…
I have an uncle by marriage whose mother was a nurse during the flu pandemic. She said that each time she did her rounds, by the time she made it to the end of the ward three or four guys she’d just checked on would have died.
Also, to elaborate on the Gladwell comment about the disease hitting the young folk harder–what made it more frightening was that the big, healthy strapping lads from the farms were the ones who died most often. The survivors were more likely to be the scrawny guys from the cities. (Of course, they were the one who would have been exposed to more diseases over the course of their lives, so they had better immune systems.)
Try reading the book “the Great Influenza” by Barry. It gives a great overview of the state of medicine in the US and the effects of the flu. His description of how it was living through the outbreak would make Stephen King 'fraidy-scared. Of particular horror was the attitude of the generals and admirals shipping men overseas. They thought that the two week trip would work as a quarantine period. In fact, they had thousands of men literally locked closely together with little ventilation and inadequate sanitary facilities. At first, the ships captains would record the name, rank, place of origin and some other details of whoever died. After a few days, so many were dying that they simply recorded the name and date before throwing them overboard.
Apparantly, there are still a great deal of unknowns about the 1918 flu. But, it appears to have triggered an absolute, total, no holds barred response from the body’s immune systems in trying to fight it. People died not so much from the flu itself, but from the “debris” of the immune systems efforts. The result was the stronger the immune system - such as in young healthy men - the more likely it was to kill you.