![]() The soldiers died on the same day, and the genomes of the virus that killed them showed almost no genetic differences between them, he said.īut the form of the flu virus found in their lungs had several genetic differences from the form of the virus that infected the young woman who died in Munich, presumably in a later wave of the pandemic. The researchers extracted viral RNA from those samples to reconstruct about 60% and 90%, respectively, of the genomes of the flu virus that killed the soldiers. The first wave of the pandemic, in early 1918, was less deadly than those that followed, and the preserved lungs of the two German soldiers who died in Berlin date from that time, he said. But it was much deadlier then, mainly because humans today are descended from people who survived the infection more than a hundred years ago and so they've inherited some form of genetic immunity, Calvignac-Spencer said.Įstimates suggest this strain of influenza infected up to 1 billion people worldwide, when the global population was only 2 billion between 50 million and 100 million people may have died in three successive waves, Calvignac-Spencer said. The virus responsible for the 1918 influenza pandemic still circulates today. ![]()
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