Researchers unlock secrets of 1918 flu pandemic

News Type: Event — Seeded on Tue Dec 30, 2008 10:47 AM EST

Article Source: Reuters

science, flu, genetics, influenza, pandemic-flu, 1918-pandemic

Researchers have found out what made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly -- a group of three genes that lets the virus invade the lungs and cause pneumonia.

They mixed samples of the 1918 influenza strain with modern seasonal flu viruses to find the three genes and said their study might help in the development of new flu drugs.

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Killfile

Later on in the article they mention that the 1918 flu had a mortality rate of roundabouts 2.5% whereas the regular run-of-the-mill flu that you'll get this winter has a mortality rate of roundabouts 1%.

Those numbers seem off to me.

Not everyone gets the flu every year (obviously), indeed it's probably been a good 10 years since I've had a run-in with it, but even then if we've got 300,000,000 in this country and 1 in 10 contract the flu in a given year that's 30,000,000 flu cases, 1% of which is 300,000.

We're not losing 300,000 people to the flu every year, are we?

Assuming, however, that I have no idea what I'm talking about there, 2.5% mortality rate is only a little more deadly than 1%. It's higher, but it's not that much higher. It seems to me that we'd expect the 1918 flu to be not just more deadly, but much more contagious as well.

If 50 million people died from it and we presume a 2.5% mortality rate that means we had roughly 2,000,000,000 (worldwide) infected...which is problematic given that there were only 1.8 Billion people on earth in 1918 to begin with.

Something's wrong with all this math.....

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#1 - Tue Dec 30, 2008 11:10 AM EST

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Researchers unlock secrets of 1918 flu pandemic

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