Flu race : the Spanish flu.

John Waite looks at the history of flu pandemics, starting with the Spanish flu of 1918 that killed more than 20 million people. In 1933 a team of doctors working for the Medical Research Council in Mill Hill identified the virus H1M1 and was able to produce a vaccine for it. But a different strain was found to be responsible for the flu epidemics of 1957 and 1968, in China and Hong Kong. In 1997 Professor John Oxford and a team of scientists examined the bodies of seven Norwegian victims of the Spanish flu epidemic who have been buried in the Arctic Circle. It is hoped that the scientists will be able to identify the virus in the frozen bodies that could be used to create a vaccine.