Scientists in the U.S. (where else?) have recreated the Spanish flu virus which, in 1918, killed 1% of all human life on this planet. And they’ve done so in the second-highest contamination level. That’s scary enough although not as scary as the Guardian makes it out to be. The reseachers working with this virus won’t be wearing full decomtamination suits but they will be using half-air hoods and will be vaccinated against a similar virus strain. In fact, according to the New Scientist, we’re all maginally immunised against the 1918 flu after Russia accidently released a weak version of the virus in the 70′s (file that under surprising-and-scary-things-I-never-knew).

No, none of those facts are half as scary as the discovery that H5N1 bird flu appears to be developing along the same lines as the 1918 flu. The instances of H5N1 that have caused fatalities have all had a subset of the same mutations as the 1918 flu but, so far, not all the mutations have been found together. It has also been confirmed that the 1918 flu was a bird flu, and not, as previously believed, a combination of human and avian flus. This makes it more likely that H5N1 could develop into a pandemic without recombining with a human virus.

It’s not all doom-and-gloom however, as the 76% (!) fatality rate for H5N1 is only based on known deaths and may have been over-exaggerated due to the underreporting of non-fatal cases. As Ken Seefried points out, it’s a lot harder to miss a dead body than someone with the sniffles (like me for the past week), so fatal cases are far more likely to get reported.