Scientists fear repeat of 1918 superflu outbreak that killed 50 MILLION worldwide and left bodies outnumbering coffins
DOCTORS fear another super-flu outbreak like the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed so many people there were more bodies than coffins.
A century after one of history's most catastrophic disease outbreaks - which killed tens of millions as it swept the globe - scientists are fighting to guard against a deadly new pandemic.
There's no way to predict what strain of the shape-shifting flu virus could spread across the planet or, given modern medical tools, how bad it might be.
But researchers hope they're finally closing in on stronger flu jabs, ways to boost much-needed protection against ordinary winter influenza and guard against future pandemics at the same time.
Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said: "We have to do better and by better, we mean a universal flu vaccine.
"A vaccine that is going to protect you against essentially all, or most, strains of flu."
Labs around the country are hunting for a super-shot that could eliminate the annual autumn vaccination in favour of one every five years or 10 years, or maybe, eventually, a childhood immunisation that could last for life.
Fauci is designating a universal flu vaccine a top priority for NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Last summer, he brought together more than 150 leading researchers to map a path. A few attempts are entering first-stage human safety testing.
But, despite 100 years of science, the flu virus too often beats humanity's best defences because it constantly mutates.
Researchers are dissecting the cloak that disguises influenza as it sneaks past the immune system, and finding some rare targets that stay the same from strain to strain, year to year.
"We've made some serious inroads into understanding how we can better protect ourselves. Now we have to put that into fruition," said well-known flu biologist Ian Wilson of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
THE MAN WHO RESURRECTED THE 1918 FLU
The NIH's Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger calls the 1918 flu the mother of all pandemics.
While working as a pathologist for the military, he led the team that identified and reconstructed the extinct 1918 virus, using traces unearthed in autopsy samples from First World War soldiers and from a victim buried in the Alaskan permafrost.
That misnamed Spanish flu "made all the world a killing zone," wrote John M. Barry in "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History."
Historians think it started in Kansas in early 1918.
By winter 1919, the virus had infected one-third of the global population and killed at least 50 million people, including 675,000 Americans.
By comparison, the AIDS virus has claimed 35 million lives over four decades.
Three more flu pandemics have struck since, in 1957, 1968 and 2009, spreading widely but nowhere near as deadly.
Taubenberger's research shows the family tree, each subsequent pandemic a result of flu viruses carried by birds or pigs mixing with 1918 flu genes.
"This 100-year timeline of information about how the virus adapted to us and how we adapt to the new viruses, it teaches us that we can't keep designing vaccines based on the past," said Dr. Barney Graham, deputy director of NIH's Vaccine Research Center.
Back in 1918 there was no flu vaccine and it wouldn't arrive for decades.
Today vaccination is the best protection but at best, the seasonal vaccine is 60% effective.
Protection dropped to 19% a few years ago when the vaccine didn't match an evolving virus.
If a never-before-seen flu strain erupts, it takes months to brew a new vaccine.
Doses arrived too late for the last, fortunately mild, pandemic in 2009.
Lacking a better option, Fauci said the nation is "chasing" animal flu strains that might become the next human threat.
Today's top concern is a lethal bird flu that jumped from poultry to more than 1,500 people in China since 2013.
Last year it mutated, meaning millions of just-in-case vaccine doses in a US stockpile no longer match.
While scientists hunt for answers, "it's folly to predict" what a next pandemic might bring, Fauci said.
Chinese H7N9 bird flu "worries me a lot," Dr Taubenberger said. "For a virus like influenza that is a master at adapting and mutating and evolving to meet new circumstances, it's crucially important to understand how these processes occur in nature.
"How does an avian virus become adapted to a mammal?"
While scientists hunt those answers, "it's folly to predict" what a next pandemic might bring, Fauci said. "We just need to be prepared."
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