Dispatches from 1918
Radiolab
00:00
The Pandemic Virus
In 1957, a dual infection occurred between the human virus that derived from 1918 and an unknown bird virus. Because they were both flu viruses, they both had those eight gene segments,. Which means they could mix and match those genes to create a new virus. And thanks to that new H and N, it killed over a million people worldwide and over 100,000 in the US. In 1977, the H1N1 virus, all eight genes from the 1918 virus that stopped circulating in 1957 came back into human circulation.
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