Spanish Flu
What is the Spanish Flu?
The Spanish flu was a dreadful worldwide pandemic that killed between 50-100 million people in an 18 month period during 1918 and 1919. This classifies it as a 5 on the Pandemic Severity Index, meaning more than 2% people who were infected died. The Spanish flu was in the same category of severity as the Bubonic Plague, which, when it struck as the Black Death, killed about 75 million people, 25-50 million of them in Europe. The Spanish flu was caused by an unusually severe and deadly Influenza a virus strain of subtype H1N1.
Genetic fabric from the Spanish flu virus has been retrieved from the body of a flu victim in Alaskan permafrost, a woman who had collapsed in the wilderness after being struck down by the disease. This genetic material has been used to recreate the virus from scratch and sequence its entire genome, which has been published on the Internet. Some technologists, such as inventor Ray Kurzweil and Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, have expressed dismay at this development.
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