Was the Influenza a Virus Subtype H1N1 Pandemic Created by a Human Mistake?
All kinds of scenarios are circulating (especially on the Internet) concerning the origins of the 2009 A/H1N1 flu. Residents of the Mexican town where the first case was diagnosed in March say that a neighboring US-owned factory, which produces 950,000 pigs a year, is to blame. It has also been claimed, for instance, that the 1918 influenza virus has been retrieved from frozen Inuits’ victims bodies in 1997, and inadvertently released. Now, in June 2009, the very serious New England Journal of Medicine published a study according to which the virus responsible for H1N1 comes from a strain of the 1918 influenza, released into nature after a laboratory mistake, in the 1970s. Searchers from the university of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have come to that conclusion after a long investigation which has led them to follow the virus through one century of mutations. It all starts at the end of the First World War. The influenza kills at least 50 million people between 1918 and 1921. But, if the
