Three weeks ago, an international team of scientists, armed with radar and a somewhat grisly plan, huddled in front of seven grave markers near a church in the tiny Norwegian coal mining village of Longyearbyen, population 1,400.
The light was winter dim, as it always is this time of year in the archipelago that Americans call Spitsbergen, less than 800 miles from the North Pole.
The Norwegians call it Svalbard, and it is the kind of place people describe as godforsaken yet starkly beautiful, where the wind from the polar ice cap is so hard “you could lean against it,” as one scientist put it last week. The temperature these days is 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and the permafrost – the layer of earth that never thaws – is close to the surface.
It is, in other words, a perfect place for quick-freezing things, like the bodies of seven young coal miners who died during the “Spanish flu” pandemic in 1918 and were buried in graves dug by dynamite, so records from the coal mining company suggest.
The 1918 flu – which killed 20 to 40 million people worldwide – was infamous for attacking the young and strong as well as the weak and old and for causing so much fluid to accumulate in the lungs that victims died by drowning. But the virus also vanished within days of causing infection, often leaving no trace as the delicate strands of its RNA simply disintegrated in the body.
That has meant that modern scientists have not been able to get their hands on the virus, much less figure out why the 1918 strain was so deadly or indentify mutations in the ever-evolving microbe that might be equally deadly in the future. That knowledge could prevent another devastating epidemic.
But viruses, or pieces of them, may still lurk in frozen tissue, so the scientists reason that if the bodies of the miners froze quickly and remained so for the nearly 80 years since, they might be able to find them.
The scientists are hoping to get permission to dig up the bodies next fall and extract tissue samples to look for the virus. The samples would be flown out to be studied in so-called P-4 laboratories in England and the United States, facilities built to prevent even the tiniest, most deadly organisms from escaping.
Any 1918 virus that still exists is probably inactive, but there is always a theoretical chance that some samples could be infectious, says Dr. Charles Smith, a pathologist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and a member of the expedition, though he adds, “I haven’t met anyone who thinks it’s a realistic possibility.”
The idea of digging up bodies to look for the 1918 flu virus is not new. Army researchers did just that in a secret mission to Alaska in the 1950s. But those bodies had not been buried in permafrost and were so decomposed that no virus was found.
The new effort is led by Kirsty Duncan, a 30-year-old gymnast-turned-climatologist at Windsor University in Ontario. Duncan, who still runs 10 miles and does 1,000 situps a day, according to a colleague, did not return phone calls from the Globe.
Other team members also declined to speak on the record, saying they had agreed on a self-imposed “news blackout.”
But a team spokesman in Oslo confirmed to The Associated Press last week that the team had spent five days using radar to determine the depth of the bodies. And Nils Lorentsen, editor of the weekly Svaldbard Posten, which has a staff of four and a circulation of 2,600, said in a telephone interview that he had accompanied the researchers to the graveyard.
He also said the bodies turned out to be buried one meter down, well into the permafrost, which starts a half meter from the surface.
That means the digging will probably go forward next year, a project Lorentsen said villagers deemed “okay” at a town meeting with the scientists on Oct. 11 at UNIS, the Longyearbyen branch of the Norwegian university system.
Final permission to exhume the bodies would have to come from the Norwegian ministries of health and cultural heritage, said an expedition member who spoke on condition he not be named.
For nearly 80 years, scientists have been fascinated – and horrified – by the ferocity of the virus that caused the Spanish flu, which despite its name is thought to have appeared first in Kansas. The virus killed 642,000 Americans over a two-year period at the end of World War I, says Dr. Keiji Fukuda, chief of the influenza branch of the epidemiology section of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s more Americans than were killed in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined – and it could happen again, if the right, or wrong, combination of genes pops up in another mutation in the influenza family.
Influenza viruses that affect humans are made up of the single-stranded genetic material RNA and come in one of two main types, A or B, said Dr. John J. Treanor, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
The B type does not cause worldwide pandemics. But the A type, including the Spanish flu virus, does, probably because it infects not just people but waterfowl, chickens, pigs, horses, seals, and whales.
Both A and B flu viruses are constantly mutating. Usually, the mutations are minor, a process called antigenic drift that results in small changes in the two major proteins on the virus’ surface, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Though small, these changes are big enough that if you are vaccinated against the flu or become infected one year, the antibodies you make probably won’t protect you against the new strains a year later.
But sometimes the mutations are huge, a process called antigenic shift, rather than drift. Scientists think this often occurs when a flu virus from a bird and one from a human simultaneously infect a pig.
The two viruses combine and swap genetic material inside pig lung cells and the result is a new, virulent virus, says Treanor, adding that this occurs every 10 to 20 years – including in 1957 and 1968, pandemic flu years.
Last summer, scientists were alarmed that a terrible pandemic might be brewing when a 3-year-old child in Hong Kong died of an influenza A virus that appeared to have come directly from birds, without going through a pig host. But so far, no other humans have been found to be infected with this virus.
For a while, scientists thought the deadly 1918 flu virus might also have jumped directly from birds to people. But last March, researchers at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C., led by pathologist Jeffrey K. Taubenberger, reported in the journal Science that they had deciphered a small part of the 1918 virus and found that it had adapted to growth in mammals.
The group had access to a unique asset, said Ann Reid,a research biologist at the institute – millions of tissue samples from as long ago as the Civil War preserved in parafin.
The team searched the archives for samples from people who had died quickly in 1918 – fast enough that traces of the elusive virus might not have disappeared. They found more than a dozen such samples and examined them under the microscope.
They hit pay dirt with one, from a 21-year-old Army private who died at the height of the pandemic. Using a technique called PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, the researchers amplified the sample until they had enough to try to determine the exact sequence, or genetic code, of the viral RNA.
So far, they have identified more than 7 percent of the virus’s genetic makeup, said Reid, adding that the Armed Forces team is now collaborating with the Spitsbergen group.
But “we still haven’t found the smoking gun,” she said, meaning that the bits of virus already studied provide no clue as to why the 1918 virus was so lethal. But the work is still proceeding, and the final clue may come from the little churchyard in Longyearbyen.
“There is competition between the Longyearbyen group and those working on parafin samples in warmer climes,” said one researcher working on the Norwegian project. “But I don’t care who wins, because if the viral fragments are found and decoded, the winner is humanity as a whole.”
Protect yourself
The best way to protect yourself against influenza, which leads to the death of 20,000 Americans a year, is to get a flu shot. But if you do get sick, anti-viral drugs can help.
So far, only two are on the market, amantadine and rimantadine. Both work only against Type A influenza, the more serious type, and both have side effects that can make them unsuitable for some people. Two newer drugs under study are Zanamivir (GS167) and a competitor called GS4104, both of which work against Type A and Type B strains.
Zanamivir reduces symptoms if taken early, according to a study published in September in the New England Journal of Medicine.
It works by blocking an enzyme called neuraminidase that the virus needs to spread, says Dr. John J. Treanor of the University of Rochester Medical Center, one of the authors. The drug, inhaled or taken as a nasal spray, was tested in 262 adult flu patients in more than 60 medical centers in the United States and Europe. It cut the duration of flu by about a day, and in patients with fever, by three days.
Zanamivir is being developed by Glaxo Wellcome, for whom several of the researchers, including Treanor, have consulted.
The other drug, GS4104, also a neuraminidase blocker, is under study by F. Hoffmann-LaRoche Ltd. and Gilead Sciences, Inc.
In a study of 80 people with the flu, the researchers reported in September, the pill decreased the duration of symptoms by 50 percent. In another study, the drug prevented flu in all 37 volunteers who took it after being deliberated infected with the virus.
New vaccines are also in the works, among them a DNA-based product being studied in Tennessee and at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
As for this year’s flu season, scientists are expecting no surprises, says Dr. Susan Lett, director of immunization at the state Department of Public Health. But if you haven’t gotten your shot, you should – they’re 70 to 90 percent effective.
If you do get the flu, you can ask your doctor about anti-flu drugs. But in most cases, you’ll probably be told to try the old standby stuff – rest, fluids and acetaminophen (not aspirin, which can cause Reye syndrome in kids with the flu.)
Information on where to get flu shots is available from your local Board of Health, or check with your doctor or health plan.