Why are scientists still baffled by the 1918 Spanish flu?

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Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...nderstand_the_1918_flu_even_after.single.html

The Worst Pandemic in History
After years of sometimes bizarre research, why are scientists still baffled by the 1918 Spanish flu?

By Mark Joseph Stern|Posted Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2012, at 1:16 PM ET

Ninety-five years ago in the little town of Brevig Mission, Alaska, a deadly new virus called Spanish influenza struck quickly and brutally. It killed 90 percent of the town?s Inuit population, leaving scores of corpses that few survivors were willing to touch. The Alaskan territorial government hired gold miners from Nome to travel to flu-ravaged towns and bury the dead. The miners arrived in Brevig Mission shortly after the medical calamity, tossed the victims into a pit two meters deep, and covered them with permafrost...

 

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Re: Why are scientists still baffled by the 1918 Spanish flu?

The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which served as the largest pathology institute in the world before it was disbanded in 2011, has preserved tissue samples going back to the Civil War. If Taubenberger can get his hands on a few flu-infected pieces of lung from before 1918, he might be able to sequence the pre-1918 influenza virus. A comparison of the two viruses could reveal how Spanish flu mutated its way to the top, giving us a greater understanding of influenza in general?and possibly even paving the way for the development of the mythical universal vaccine.

That should be a priority for flu research.