Attempt to Find Early 20th Century Flu Virus in Norwegian Coffins Fails

Canadian scientists who had gone to a Norwegian graveyard hoping to find samples of the influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic said Wednesday that their expedition apparently has failed. The team’s goal was to excavate the coffins of seven miners killed by the virus. Scientists believed that the coffins were buried beneath the permafrost, where they would have been permanently frozen.

But when the coffins were excavated, they were found to be above the permafrost layer, said Kirsty Duncan, the team’s leader. The soil around them must have thawed each spring, killing the virus. The U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology announced in February that it had found frozen fragments of the virus in a body buried in Alaska.

Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II