A 21-year-old Army private took his final breath during the
early morning hours in Camp Jackson, S.C. Two months later, an
Inuit woman perished along with nearly all the other adults in
her Alaskan village. During that same month, a 50-year-old woman
died not long after going to the Royal London Hospital — the
same hospital where, early the next year, a 25-year-old London
man died two days after checking in. The four people had little
in common except that 86 years ago they all fell victim to one
of the deadliest viruses in history — the 1918 Spanish flu,
which killed 20-40 million people. Now scientists hope scraps of
their remains could help save the world from future scourges
like one that could mutate from a bird flu now spreading in
Asia. "There is always the fear that another outbreak like the
Spanish Flu can certainly happen again," said Jeffrey
Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in
Washington, who co-authored one of the studies published in this
week's Science. "So if we can learn