THE 1918 flu infected virtually everyone on the planet within a year of its appearance. It made about a third of them sick, 3 per cent of whom died – and those are conservative estimates. So the virus killed at least 1 per cent of humanity.
In 1919 the killer disappeared – but now it is back, painstakingly reconstructed from hospital specimens and bodies preserved in Arctic permafrost. Scientists have rebuilt the 1918 virus and are studying it to see what made it so deadly (“Bird flu warning from replica virus ints at”). Without a doubt, this is a triumph for…
