Kirsty Duncan, author of Hunting the 1918 Flu, spoke at Victoria College on Wednesday night on her investigation into one of the most deadly killers of the twentieth century: the Spanish flu of 1918. She examined bodies buried in permafrost in the Norwegian Arctic that contained some of last remaining intact viruses from the 1918 epidemic.
The Spanish flu was one of the deadliest epidemics in history, and the single deadliest instance of influenza in the twentieth century. The World Health Organization estimates that 40 million people died worldwide, including some 50,000 Canadians. Some smaller villages in Quebec and Labrador were completely wiped out.
Duncan said that reading one story about Spanish flu victims in Montreal really made her take notice. “They couldn’t keep up with the demand for hearses, so they converted trolley cars into funeral cars because they could carry up to 10 corpses each.”
The influenza virus never goes away; it comes back every year in different strains. Particularly deadly strains broke out in 1957 with Asian influenza, and in 1968 with Hong Kong influenza. Duncan says that we do not know when the next big strain will hit, but “someone could unknowingly harbour a virus, get on a plane, and not get the symptoms until they arrive.” The most threatening strain of influenza today is the avian flu from Asia.
Duncan says that we should study the Spanish flu so that if it, or something like it, comes back, we will be ready. Many in the original Spanish Flu epidemic died of pneumonia, which we can now treat. But influenza itself is much more difficult to cure because it changes all the time.
Before Duncan completed her study, scientists only had bits and pieces of the entire Spanish flu virus from only specific organs. Duncan wanted to sample an entire body to get the full picture of what the Spanish flu virus was like and what it did.
She found a very unique source for her virus sample. In 1918, seven young men took a ferry from the Norwegian mainland to Spitsbergen, the largest island in Norway’s arctic Svalbard archipelago. They contracted the Spanish flu on the boat and died shortly after arriving. It was the last boat of the season, and so instead of being transported back to Norway they were buried on the island in the permafrost. Today, more than 85 years later, their bodies contain some of the last remaining preserved viruses in the entire world.
Duncan wanted to be extremely cautious. “If I was going to do this work, I was going to do it with the highest standards of safety.” In order to get approval from the local government, she agreed to document and replace the graves perfectly, as if they had never been disturbed.
The utmost precautions were taken. The entire team was fully clad in biohazard suits, had taken leading-edge flu treatment drugs, and did all their work under the cover of a sealed research tent.
Before digging could begin they probed the land to make sure of the whereabouts and the state of the bodies. Duncan said it was very difficult: “Digging in permafrost was like digging in concrete,” except she said that with sub-zero temperatures, one could only work for 20 minutes at a time. The use of machinery was ruled out because of the risk of melting the permafrost and thereby spoiling samples.
After the samples were taken and sealed, they were immediately transported by private jet to the nearest level-four disease research laboratory in London-the same place the Ebola virus is kept.
The samples Duncan took from the lung, liver, kidneys, and brain provide a much more holistic picture of what the live 1918 virus would have looked like. The samples are now the domain of laboratory research scientists in Britain and Canada.
Along the way, Duncan said she faced some unexpected hurdles because of her gender. She never expected to be asked the question by a member of her research team: “Do you want to be treated as a scientist or a woman?”
She says, “The worst experience was being asked to be photographed on the hood of a car by the research site.”
