ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Samples from the frozen body of a man buried nearly 80 years ago in the remote northwest Alaskan village of Brevig Mission have yielded valuable clues about the deadly 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic that swept the globe, federal scientists say.
Researchers from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, based in Washington, DC, reported last week they had found genetic material from the body of the Inupiat Eskimo man, a victim of the disease that killed 85 percent of the villagers in a single week.
The body exhumed by researchers in their search for the virus remnants had been buried in a mass grave, officials said.
It is the third sample of genetic material that the researchers have managed to collect from that flu virus, said Jeffrey Taubenberger, chief of the institute's molecular pathology division and lead investigator for the project.
Other samples were collected from lung tissues, preserved in formaldehyde, taken from US soldiers in New York and South Carolina who died from the epidemic.
The genetic material from all flu viruses is in the form of RNA, a single-strand structure that is far less stable than the double-strand DNA, Taubenberger said. RNA usually breaks down in less than a month, he said, and that makes it particularly difficult to preserve.
Each flu virus is genetically unique, he said.
The Alaska information gives researchers enough bits of RNA to piece together the gene sequence from the 1918 virus, Taubenberger said.
That could help health officials cope with the next flu pandemic, he said.
Records dating to the 1700s indicate that global flu epidemics occur every 10 to 30 years, Taubenberger said. With the last major outbreaks occurring in 1957 and 1968, the world is due for another such experience, he said.
"We definitely will see another flu pandemic," he said.
The 1918 epidemic was particularly vicious, killing about 2.5 percent of the US population, Taubenberger said. Victims often succumbed within a few days of contracting the virus, records say.
