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Why Revive a Deadly Flu Virus?
Why Revive a Deadly Flu Virus?
By JAMIE SHREEVE, The New York Times, January 29, 2006
One morning last August, Terrence Tumpey, a research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, walked into a room across a corridor from his office and took off all his clothes. He pulled on cotton scrubs and a disposable gown, two pairs of latex gloves and headgear with a clear plastic shield enclosing his face and a tube running out the back to a set of filters strapped to his waist. He walked through another door and down a hallway to a large upright freezer. Mounted beside the freezer was a retinal scanner. Tumpey, who is 6 feet tall, bent down a little to position his eyes in line with the lens. In a digital voice, the scanner asked him to step forward. Tumpey complied. "Identification confirmed," the scanner said, and a lock on the freezer clicked open.
Inside the freezer were trays and boxes containing "select agents" - highly pathogenic microbes that under the Patriot Act cannot be handled without special clearance from the Department of Justice. Tumpey wiped the frost off a box. He was the only person in the C.D.C., or anywhere else, authorized to handle this particular agent: a synthesized version of an influenza virus that, nearly a century before, killed between 20 million and 50 million people. He placed the box in a secure container, and after showering and dressing, carried the container through secure corridors to another building at the C.D.C., where he entered another suite of rooms, dressing once again according to Biosafety Level 3+ protocols, the second most stringent level of biosecurity. For the next couple of hours, he squirted the virus into the nostrils of laboratory mice. He was fairly certain they would all soon die.
Getting the flu can be a real drag. Your head pounds, your muscles ache, you lie in a bed of misery, surrounded by clammy tufts of used Kleenex you're too tired to pick up. Every year, 5 to 20 percent of the American population catches a flu virus. The elderly, very young children and people with certain health conditions are at risk for more serious complications, and annually some 36,000 of them die. Every few decades, a particularly virulent strain appears and causes a global pandemic. In the 20th century, flu pandemics occurred in 1918, 1957 and 1968. The last two killed two million and 700,000 people respectively - again, claiming most of their victims among the young, the old and the weak.
The 1918 flu virus is remarkable for two reasons. First, it caused perhaps the most lethal plague in the history of humankind. In the fall of that year it spread across the planet, perversely striking down healthy young adults. Once ensconced in their lungs, the virus triggered a havoc of inflammation, hemorrhage and cell death. Trying to draw air into such lungs was like breathing through meat. Many of the afflicted died within hours after they first began to feel a little feverish. Others succumbed more slowly to secondary bacterial infections. By the spring of the following year, the virus had disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.
The second, and in some ways even more remarkable, thing about the 1918 flu virus is that it has literally been brought back to life. In October, a team of scientists, Tumpey among them, announced that they had recreated the extinct organism from its genetic code - essentially the scenario played out in the movie "Jurassic Park," albeit on a microbial scale. In the movie, the scientists' self-serving revivification of dinosaurs leads to mayhem and death. Tumpey and his colleagues say they hope that their resurrected microbe will help prevent a calamity, not cause one. They want to know what made the 1918 flu, which began as a virus native to wild birds, mutate into a form that could pass easily from one human to another. That question has been weighing on the minds of flu experts since 1997 - since the first fatal case in Hong Kong of the avian flu that has since killed more than 70 people in Asia. So far, all of its victims probably caught the disease from handling infected poultry and not from other people. How close is it to crossing the same lethal line that the 1918 virus did? What can be learned from the virus that caused the great pandemic that might help us avert another one?
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By JAMIE SHREEVE, The New York Times, January 29, 2006
One morning last August, Terrence Tumpey, a research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, walked into a room across a corridor from his office and took off all his clothes. He pulled on cotton scrubs and a disposable gown, two pairs of latex gloves and headgear with a clear plastic shield enclosing his face and a tube running out the back to a set of filters strapped to his waist. He walked through another door and down a hallway to a large upright freezer. Mounted beside the freezer was a retinal scanner. Tumpey, who is 6 feet tall, bent down a little to position his eyes in line with the lens. In a digital voice, the scanner asked him to step forward. Tumpey complied. "Identification confirmed," the scanner said, and a lock on the freezer clicked open.
Inside the freezer were trays and boxes containing "select agents" - highly pathogenic microbes that under the Patriot Act cannot be handled without special clearance from the Department of Justice. Tumpey wiped the frost off a box. He was the only person in the C.D.C., or anywhere else, authorized to handle this particular agent: a synthesized version of an influenza virus that, nearly a century before, killed between 20 million and 50 million people. He placed the box in a secure container, and after showering and dressing, carried the container through secure corridors to another building at the C.D.C., where he entered another suite of rooms, dressing once again according to Biosafety Level 3+ protocols, the second most stringent level of biosecurity. For the next couple of hours, he squirted the virus into the nostrils of laboratory mice. He was fairly certain they would all soon die.
Getting the flu can be a real drag. Your head pounds, your muscles ache, you lie in a bed of misery, surrounded by clammy tufts of used Kleenex you're too tired to pick up. Every year, 5 to 20 percent of the American population catches a flu virus. The elderly, very young children and people with certain health conditions are at risk for more serious complications, and annually some 36,000 of them die. Every few decades, a particularly virulent strain appears and causes a global pandemic. In the 20th century, flu pandemics occurred in 1918, 1957 and 1968. The last two killed two million and 700,000 people respectively - again, claiming most of their victims among the young, the old and the weak.
The 1918 flu virus is remarkable for two reasons. First, it caused perhaps the most lethal plague in the history of humankind. In the fall of that year it spread across the planet, perversely striking down healthy young adults. Once ensconced in their lungs, the virus triggered a havoc of inflammation, hemorrhage and cell death. Trying to draw air into such lungs was like breathing through meat. Many of the afflicted died within hours after they first began to feel a little feverish. Others succumbed more slowly to secondary bacterial infections. By the spring of the following year, the virus had disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.
The second, and in some ways even more remarkable, thing about the 1918 flu virus is that it has literally been brought back to life. In October, a team of scientists, Tumpey among them, announced that they had recreated the extinct organism from its genetic code - essentially the scenario played out in the movie "Jurassic Park," albeit on a microbial scale. In the movie, the scientists' self-serving revivification of dinosaurs leads to mayhem and death. Tumpey and his colleagues say they hope that their resurrected microbe will help prevent a calamity, not cause one. They want to know what made the 1918 flu, which began as a virus native to wild birds, mutate into a form that could pass easily from one human to another. That question has been weighing on the minds of flu experts since 1997 - since the first fatal case in Hong Kong of the avian flu that has since killed more than 70 people in Asia. So far, all of its victims probably caught the disease from handling infected poultry and not from other people. How close is it to crossing the same lethal line that the 1918 virus did? What can be learned from the virus that caused the great pandemic that might help us avert another one?
( Read More )