Study into flu origins

THE seasonal flu could be a “direct descendant” of the 1918 Spanish flu, which sparked a pandemic killing between 50 and 100 million people, new research has revealed.

Berlin’s Robert Koch Institute researchers analysed lung specimens collected between 1901 and 1931 in Europe and held in historical archives, with their results published in Nature Communications today.

The researchers argue the lungs had specific genes that, when compared to the current H1N1 strain, suggest that they contained a genomic ancestor to our yearly flu, the Australian Science Media Centre reported.