THE frozen remains of seven coal miners may hold the secrets of a disease that wiped out 20 million people just after the First World War. Researchers in Canada and the US are planning to exhume bodies buried in permafrost on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to study the pathogen that caused 鈥淪panish flu鈥�. They hope their findings will help scientists prepare for the disease should it ever return.
In 1918, a disease emerged which began with the familiar symptoms of influenza: fever and muscle aches. But many cases culminated in a form of pneumonia so severe that patients drowned in their own lung fluid. In just two years, the illness claimed more lives than the Great War.
Doctors then did not have the molecular know-how to characterise the pathogen responsible. Even today scientists do not know the exact identity of the infectious agent, or why it was so deadly, says Kirsty Duncan, who studies climate and disease at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, and is leader of the team planning to disinter the frozen miners. Some experts believe the Spanish flu strain carried a genetic mutation that made it supervirulent. Others maintain that the severity of the epidemic was due to a deadly combination of a normal flu virus and a potent pneumonia-causing bacterium.
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鈥淲e would like to know what the trigger was,鈥� says Dominick Iacuzio, director of flu research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases near Washington DC. 鈥淔lu epidemics return in cycles, and we鈥檇 like to be able to screen for factors that made this one kill like a firestorm.鈥�
The problem was that scientists had no samples of diseased tissue well enough preserved to reveal the pathogen鈥檚 secrets. So three years ago, Duncan began to search the records for victims whose bodies had been naturally preserved by burial in permafrost in the far North. After several false starts, she learnt of a coal mine in Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle that had lost workers to a flu-like disease shortly after the war. Geological survey data showed that the ground temperature in Spitsbergen never rises above 1 掳C鈥攑erfect for preserving tissue.
Finding the bodies was not easy. Duncan travelled to the island only to discover that no local government, church or hospital records dated back so far. Finally, she located diaries owned by a local schoolteacher that recorded the lives of miners 78 years ago. She identified seven men, all in their twenties, who had been killed by flu, and tracked down their graves. After almost a year of meetings, Duncan last month obtained permission from the men鈥檚 families and the Norwegian Ministry of Antiquities to exhume the bodies.
Duncan is now assembling a team of experts, including virologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, to decide how to analyse tissue from the men without releasing the dangerous pathogen in the process.
Duncan says that each body will be exhumed for a short time, while lung tissue is removed, and will be reinterred with whatever religious practices the family requests. 鈥淥nce the families understood what we were doing, they were very helpful,鈥� Duncan says. 鈥淎nd we promised them we鈥檇 treat their relatives with the greatest respect.鈥�