The 1918 Spanish flu would have become a common seasonal virus

In 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic started, which would kill between 50 and 100 million people, on a planet which then had only 2 billion inhabitants.

Almost a century later, scientists continue to study this dramatic event, to understand its own springs but also to try to draw lessons from it, perhaps, for the present and the future of the Covid pandemic. .

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This is how researchers from the Robert-Koch Institute in Berlin (Germany) and the Rega Institute in Louvain (Belgium) became interested in the evolution of the genome of the Spanish flu virus during the pandemic, and of the H1N1 strain responsible for the seasonal epidemic that followed.

For this, the scientists relied on biological samples from the time.

These small pieces of lungs were provided to them by museums housing collections of "pathologies" - in other words, diseased organs preserved in formalin and once intended for teaching...

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