Playing with the Spanish Flu

Nature has a Web focus on the 1918 flu virus. For a free account of the latest on Frankenstein's reconstituted flu virus, see this press release from the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

By infecting monkeys with the virus, the team was able to show that the 1918 virus prompted a deadly respiratory infection that echoed historical accounts of how the disease claimed its victims.

Shocking! But wait, there's more:

Importantly, the new work shows that infection with the virus prompted an immune response that seems to derail the body's typical reaction to viral infection and instead unleashes an attack by the immune system on the lungs. As immune cells attack the respiratory system, the lungs fill with fluid and victims, in essence, drown.

Somehow I doubt anyone spent the last 90 years believing that the victims were drowning in liquid flu virus. But on a more optimistic note,

The same excessive immune reaction is characteristic of the deadly complications of H5N1 avian influenza, the strain of bird flu present in Asia and which has claimed nearly 150 human lives, but has not yet shown a capacity to spread easily among people.
"What we see with the 1918 virus in infected monkeys is also what we see with H5N1 viruses," Kawaoka says, suggesting that the ability to modulate immune response may be a shared feature of the most virulent influenza viruses.

At least these guys are playing with Frankenstein's Flu at biosafety level 4 this time:

In the new study, conducted in a high-level biosafety laboratory (BSL 4) at the Public Health Agency of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory, seven primates were infected with the reconstructed 1918 virus. Clinical signs of disease were apparent within 24 hours of infection, and within eight days, euthanization was necessary. The rapid course of the disease mirrors how quickly the disease ran its course in its human victims in 1918.