Spanish Flu Finally Figured Out Researchers Say

More great news from Washington.

Researchers there claim now to finally understand what made the Spanish flu so deadly in 1918-1920. This period is now known today as the, Spanish Flu Pandemic.

Depending on who they were, or where they lived, that is to say, "depending on local conditions," anywhere from 2.5% to 50% of the people infected died from this bug, described as an H1N1 subtype of the Influenza A virus.

Although investigators have traced the origins of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic to Fort Riley, located in northeast Kansas, USA, the most commonly accepted explanation is not that anything nasty escaped from a US Army germ-lab, but it was only a purely accidental mutation of a combination of a mixture of poulty virus and swine virus which occurred quite naturally amongst the chickens and the hogs on hand at the fort for use by the cooks for feeding the troops.

Today, the H1N1 is viewed arguably as the most lethal virus in recorded history to ever infect human populations. That is to say, prior to 1918 no epidemic has ever killed more humans beings in as short a time frame. Not even the terrible Great Plague, of 1340 AD. Certainly, by all estimates H1N1 killed between 20-million and 100-million people worldwide in the 1918-1920.

Calling H1N1, "the flu," is also essentially a misnomer, for this is a hemmoragic disease causing agent. H1N1 infection causes hemmoragic tissue damage which in turn leads to other, secondary disease like pulmonary edema, for instance, as in the case of lung infection.

A bothersome question concerning H1N1 has always remained an open one, that being exactly what is it about H1N1 that makes it so deadly, especially to human populations in the 20 - 40 year-old range, an age-group not at all typical for high rates of influenza mortality.

Now we have the answer -
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