Digging for evidence of the 1918 plague

Why was the notorious Spanish flu of 1918 so deadly?

What made it lethal enough to circle the globe and kill more than 20 million
- maybe even more than 40 million people?

Why did it fell even strapping young soldiers, filling their lungs with fluid as if they'd drowned?³²

Questions that sound like the basis for a Hollywood blockbuster have haunted virologists for decades. No flu virus before or since has been so deadly that it claimed healthy young adults. Now, armed with the molecular technology to reconstruct a viral gene from a wisp of long dead tissue, scientists have begun the hunt for this mass killer.³³

The search is no idle quest. Many experts believe a pandemic is imminent, and the World Health Organization (WHO) formed a Pandemic Task Force to identify possible outbreaks. Also, a case of swine flu in 1976 and Avian flu in 1997 accelerated the viral hunt. Researchers believe that the deadliest viruses are those that break the species barrier, as was suspected with the Spanish flu. Was that part of the virus's secret? If scientists could recover preserved tissue from the 1918 dead, they could read the Spanish gene, uncover the rest of its secrets - and make a vaccine to prevent it if it ever returned.³⁴