ABOVE: Masked Red Cross workers in Saint Louis, Missouri, during the fall wave of the 1918 influenza A pandemic.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Three teenagers—two soldiers and a civilian—were among the 50 million or more estimated casualties of the 1918 influenza A pandemic. However, unlike most people who were killed by the virus, the lungs of the three were saved, preserved in formalin for more than one hundred years. Now, according to a preprint uploaded to bioRxiv on May 14, these organs are providing genetic clues as to why the virus took so many lives, Science reports.
The 1918 pandemic, a zoonotic disease thought to have jumped into people from birds, was one of the deadliest pandemics on record. Especially lethal were the second and third waves of cases, which occurred starting in the fall of that year. It’s likely that variants of the virus played a role in the differing damage ...
