In a controversial experiment, a team of scientists has recreated a deadly airborne virus resembling the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed an estimated 50 million people and infected one third of the world's population at that time. The Spanish flu, which is only 3 percent different from the recreated pathogen, has yet to be understood by global health experts and is known as "the mother of all pandemics."
The team, headed by University of Wisconsin at Madison researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka, used reverse genetics to rebuild the virus from fragments of strains of wild bird flu. According to Kawaoka's study, this new virus "may have pandemic potential."
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