【TMC News】Pathologist dug deep for Spanish flu pandemic clues

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Pathologist dug deep for Spanish flu pandemic clues
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2009/05/16/4183332.htm
IOWA CITY, May 16, 2009

Johan Hultin -- called the "Indiana Jones of Science" in recent years -- went back six decades during his visit Friday to the University of Iowa.

It was at the UI where Hultin, 84, of San Francisco, began his efforts to decipher the cause of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 that killed millions of people worldwide. Hultin received his master's degree in microbiology in 1951 and medical degree in 1953 from the UI.

"It's fantastic," Hultin said Friday of receiving an honorary doctor of science degree at the UI Carver College of Medi cine commencement. "I have the opportunity to talk to the graduate students, and I was one of them 60 years ago." Hultin, a native of Sweden, was a UI graduate student when he first went to Alaska in 1951 to find frozen virus from the flu epidemic. With permission, his crew took samples from bodies exhumed in a community devastated by the 1918 flu, hoping permafrost had preserved the virus in the tissue.

Of the village of 80 Eskimos, 72 had died in four days, Hultin said.


Although Eskimo tradition called for burial on platforms rather than underground, government contractors had buried the bodies six feet deep because of the fear surrounding the deadly flu.

Carrying the largest crate on his back, Hultin trudged through snow to the village, where the crew dug to find the specimens they needed.

Yet despite excellent facilities in the UI's microbi ology lab, he said, science had not advanced enough to make use of the tissue.

It wasn't until 1997 that Hultin made a second trek to Alaska. That time, most of the bodies had decomposed, but the crew found one intact. Hultin dubbed her Lucy, an Eskimo woman estimated to be in her late 20s when she died.

"On her left side and her right side were skeletons," he said.

By then, molecular biology had advanced to the point that the specimens from Lucy could be used as the key to sequence the genome of the flu virus.

Hultin said vaccines and antiviral medications could be developed using that discovery.

He made other discoveries during his expeditions. In at least one village, no one died in the 1918 pandemic. There, the villagers had kept the mail carrier and supply carrier away from a distance -- by shotgun -- and no one had been infected.

"In modern medicine, it's called social distancing," Hultin said, in which people stay away from others with a virus.

Iowans are not at greater risk from the current H1N1 virus, he said, noting that although it's been called swine flu, it's spread from person to person.

Hultin said the greater concern is that the flu would mutate and mix with the Asian bird flu, which is more deadly than the H1N1 virus.

"The potential is serious," he said of the combination of the easily spread H1N1 virus, with the virulent bird flu.

Hultin's latest endeavor is a study of the origins of chronic disease.