Scientists from the Australian National University have detected evidence of an event that probably triggered the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. The evidence is in the genetic data of the influenza virus that caused the pandemic.
The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was the worst disease outbreak in history killing more than 20 million people as it spread around the world in 1918 and 1919. Dr Mark Gibbs, Mr John Armstrong and Professor Adrian Gibbs, at the ANU's School of Botany and Zoology, have discovered that one of the 1918 Flu genes was a hybrid that was produced from parts of two other influenza viruses, in a process called 'recombination'. Their analysis indicated that this 'gene splicing' occurred just before the 1918 pandemic and one of the two progenitors of the 1918 virus was an influenza strain that probably infected pigs. The results suggest that the outbreak was triggered by the recombination.
The ANU team now intends to analyse all influenza sequences to assess the risk of similar recombination events that might produce future influenza outbreaks. "This is a big task as more than 6,000 influenza genes representing several thousand different influenza strains have been isolated and sequenced since the 1930s," said Dr Gibbs.
