what kind of influenza caused the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918?
Influenza pandemics (worldwide epidemics) occur every 30 to 40 years on average, when a strain of the virus emerges against which the human population has no immunity. Usually the “flu” mainly threatens the lives of the elderly and the infirm. In the fall of 1918, an outbreak of influenza swept the globe, killing between 20 and 40 million people — especially young and healthy individuals — and then it vanished. It was possibly the most devastating pandemic in human history, and no one knows what made this strain of flu so deadly — or whether or not it can strike again. After years of research Kirsty Duncan, a geographer from the University of Windsor in Canada, has located the graves of seven Norwegians who died in early October, 1918, when the epidemic reached the remote town of Longyearbyen on the Svalbard archipelago. The seven seem to be buried deep in the Arctic permafrost — and if so, the virus that killed them may be cryogenically preserved in their bodies. Next year, Duncan
