The Deadliest Flu Virus in the World: Made in USA

In the latest version of "art precedes reality," Hollywood predicted a viral outbreak that would require quarantine of an entire town in America in the 1995 movie Outbreak starring Dustin Hoffman. In that movie the virus came from a monkey being smuggled in from Zaire. The movie was more about the possibility of a virus like Ebola than the dreaded H5N1 influenza virus that now has the world in the grip of hysteria. But Outbreak dealt with the mutation of the virus, which makes it more appropriate for today’s latest viral health threat – a mutated influenza virus, probably from bird flu.

The world is being warned a flu virus might mutate at any moment and render the planet helpless against its spread. Americans don’t need to wait for a flu virus to mutate. Infectious disease specialists, working in a semi-secure laboratory at a Midwestern university have already done it ahead of nature. These American researchers obtained the viral particles from the H5N1 Spanish flu virus that killed millions worldwide and altered one of its ten genes, making it far more dangerous and virulent than any influenza virus in nature. The idea was to figure out how to make a vaccine against it. But the very idea such a virus even exists gives most people the shivers.