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[Narrator] In bustling cities and remote villages, in the United States
and around the world, orphaned children cried for their
parents in 1918.
People of all cultures struggled with the same terrible threat,
and within a matter of months, as many as 50 million
would be dead.
What was that deadly threat?
[music playing]
[Maria Prats Gomez] We had just come from, a few years before, from Mexico.
My two brothers were in one room sick; I was sick
in the other bedroom with my mother.
My mother told me that I thought her black hair
was a cat and I was afraid of it with the delirium from
the high fever.
[Priscilla Reyna Jojola] My father's name is Telesfore Reyna.
At that time he was working in Tennessee for Dupont Company.
He would always bring up the story about how he got sick
while he was in Tennessee, and how a lot of people
from the village that had gone were brought back sick.
In 1918 my mother was like just 11 years old, but she remembers
that the church bell would ring every day, that there's
a certain bell, a notice for the death.
And she said she remembers as a little girl how awful
it sounded.
[bell tolls]
[Rachel Hollis] Back in 1918, I was between ten and twelve years old,
I would say, and I got the flu, and it was just my mother and I.
Two of my friends, we went to elementary school together,
and both of them were stricken with the flu.
And I would go out to Bayview Hospital, and they'd put her
out on the porch in the cold wintertime.
And they had blankets, blankets and a hood on her, but she died,
both of them died.
[Carmen Trujillo Portillo] My mother was the midwife and she tended to the people,
the delivery of babies.
She used to take me with her to go and visit the new mothers,
and I loved to go see the new babies, and I cried because
at that time she didn't want to take me with her,
because she was tending to the sick and the dying.
One thing that stayed in my mind was the pounding
of the nailing of boards together, making --
I called them boxes -- coffins for the people.
[bell toll, hammering of nails]
[Dr. Tim Uyeki] An influenza pandemic is the emergence of a very
new influenza-A virus, to which most of the population has not
previously been exposed and does not have any immunity --
no immune protection.
Most people in the world are susceptible.
And so what you see is very high numbers of people
becoming sick worldwide.
[music playing]
[Reba Haimovitz] My mother and father and my two sisters all had the flu.
It was a very sad period.
There was like a sadness over the city.
I remember them telling me that a young neighbor --
they saw him coming home.
They watched from the window, coming from work.
And the next afternoon, they saw him carried out.
He died.
[music playing]
[Narrator] The influenza of 1918 was not only much more lethal than
seasonal flu, the death rate was very high among young adults --
strong young men and women working to support and care
for their families.
What was different about the flu that struck in 1918 and 1919?
Brevig Mission is northwest of Nome, Alaska on the Bering Sea.
The fact that Brevig exists today is remarkable,
since of the 80 residents in 1918, only eight survived
the flu pandemic.
Over 50 years ago, a medical student with an interest
in viruses found his way to the village.
[Dr. Johan Hultin] So I went out on the gravesite and started to dig.
And on the end of the second day I found the first victim.
Eventually I started to try to grow the virus, trying to find
an alive influenza virus.
Week after week after week after week, I got more
and more discouraged.
And eventually I had no more specimen.
And the virus was dead.
[Narrator] More than 25 years passed, and new techniques for
extracting DNA and RNA inspired a young molecular pathologist
to try to identify and describe the virus that caused
the 1918 flu pandemic.
[Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger] We were hoping to learn from what we see in 1918 to apply
it to the future, that we could understand how pandemics form
and why particular flu viruses cause more disease than others.
[Dr. Johan Hultin] In March of 1997 in "Science News," there it was:
"1918 Pandemic Virus Found."
A small sequence had been discovered by
Jeffery Taubenberger.
I wrote a letter saying, "If you need more specimen,
let me know, and I will go back to Alaska.
And I got the permission to go.
Because I had the photograph with me, I knew where
the grave was.
I had noticed there were some bodies at seven feet,
found a skeleton and then next to the skeleton was a perfectly
preserved woman, but I could see the skin, and it was of
an obese woman.
I started to do the post-mortem.
And here's the insulation around -- protecting the
lungs from decay.
The Eskimos are not obese -- there's not that much food
around, and they were active and hardworking, particularly
in 1918.
To find one who had extra calories,
it was just remarkable.
[Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger] It became absolutely clear that we would be able to sequence
the rest of the virus from that material.
What we hope are to identify mutations that are so crucial
to this process that if a bird virus were to adapt in the
future to a human that they would have to acquire some
of the same changes.
You could particularly design drugs that might block or bind
to that particular change to prevent a bird virus
from actually functioning in humans.
[Dr. Anne Schuchat] We know that the new 2009 H1N1 virus is in almost
every country of the world already, and it was only
first detected in -- as a new virus -- recognized as
a new virus in late April.
So in just a matter of months we've seen every continent
in the world and virtually every country affected.
[Dr. Anthony Fauci] In 1918 there wasn't even a realization that the pandemic
flu was caused by a microbe, by a virus.
They had no idea what it was.
There were no vaccines at the time nor were there any
treatments directly against the virus, and there wasn't
the intensive care capabilities that we now have in hospitals.
We are infinitely better prepared now than we were
a hundred years ago back in the beginning of the 20th century.
[music playing]
[bell tolls]