Spanish disease discovered in museum – 100 years later

The Spanish flu was a pandemic most people had heard of in school, and surely you never felt any closer than it did last year?

It was learned that the Spanish flu devastated in 1918 and cost more than 50 million people – so every tenth infected died of acute influenza.

So it was devastating. But humans have learned a lot about epidemics and through continued research, more information can be gained about how the Spanish flu developed – something that is still unknown.

catch the virus

Two lungs, belonging to two soldiers who died during the epidemic, have been placed in formalin at the Museum of Medical History in Berlin.

Geneticists have now succeeded in searching for virus particles from the Spanish disease and sequencing them in the lung tissue of the two soldiers – something that is actively being done with the coronavirus today.

To the researchers’ delight, it turned out to be an early type of Hispanic disease, something that had not been detected in previous sequences. This, in turn, can lead to the emergence of new information about the old virus.

The same research group also found samples from a 17-year-old woman who died of the virus in Munich in 1918.

What did the researchers learn?

Well, precisely that the type of virus of the two soldiers had a very low defense against the body’s immune system. They also discovered that the most deadly mutation, which appeared later during the Spanish flu, was more resistant to the body’s defenses, he writes. illustrator flag العلم.