Kirsty Duncan, a professor of medical geography at the University of Toronto, has written about a 1998 expedition to retrieve tissues from people buried in Spitzbergen, Norway, who were killed by the 1918 flu pandemic.
Figure 1.
Kirsty Duncan
University of Toronto Press, £22.50/US$35, pp 297 ISBN 0 8020 8748 5
Rating: ★★
In three waves, the pandemic raged in every continent except Antarctica. It is estimated to have killed 20 to 40 million people and it is well described here in a 22 page introductory review. Fifteen years after the pandemic, Christopher Andrews and Wilson Smith, at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) at Mill Hill in Britain, isolated the first human influenza virus, which was found to spread by airborne droplets.
Duncan wondered whether the virus that caused the 1918 pandemic could have survived in the permafrost at Spitzbergen, where seven miners, victims of the flu, lay buried in graves 70 years old. If so, then the whole or the fragmented virus could be sequenced, allowing a relationship with encephalitis lethargica (von Economo's disease) to be explored, and also enabling a vaccine to be made.
After two and a half years of preliminary study, Duncan found that the US army had mounted such an expedition in 1951. The findings were classified but the results were negative. Dr Albert McKee had also searched for the flu virus on the Seward peninsula in Alaska. In 1966 the Norwegian government had received 146 proposals from 17 nations.
Eventually Duncan successfully put together a research team and plan that was accepted by the Norwegian government. She then learnt that Dr Jeffrey Taubenberger had successfully sequenced archival fragments analysed from paraffin-embedded tissues of 1918 vintage flu victims from the US Army Institute of Pathology. His work was one of the top 100 science stories of 1977. She promptly invited him to join her team.
Duncan's aim was “to sequence the 1918 influenza virus and not to obtain viable virus.” A setback occurred when team members from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta departed, citing advances in archival material that made them withdraw. They were replaced by Sir John Skehel, director of the NIMR at Mill Hill and a former director of the World Influenza Centre in London.
A further setback occurred in 1998 when a student of Albert McKee from 1951 pre-emped the expedition by bringing back tissue samples in one week, without any bioprotection, which he felt to be unnecessary. The samples were from a mass grave in Brevig Mission, Alaska, which lost 85% of its people in a single week in 1918.
Duncan's expedition retrieved short fragments of the virus, recovered from many organs other than the lungs, suggesting that the flu infection became systemic in its victims. No clear cut conclusion was reached after laboratory analysis of the samples, and here lies opportunity for the future.
Meanwhile, this book is either a cautionary tale or a medical detective story about a gallant effort by a team of intrepid researchers.