The New England Journal of Medicine recently published an article on the supposed pandemic of the 'swine flu'. Frequent readers will know that I despise that term and prefer to call it by its proper name, H1N1.
The NEJM formally announces the link between the current 'pandemic' and an incident at Fort Dix in the seventies. According to its research, the H1N1 strain was a common variant of the flu up until the early fifties, but was considered to be extinct by the end of that decade. That is, until an outbreak of said virus at Fort Dix left one serviceman dead. The transmission method in that case was confirmed as being swine to human, making it very similar to our current H1N1 'pandemic'. Measures were taken and the virus was declared contained, never leaving the base.
It would, in fact, be until the eighties before H1N1 made a reappearance, this time in China and eastern Russia. Nicknamed the 'Russian flu', it targeted mostly children, adolescents and the elderly. The world paid it little notice, and the strain was forgotten.
What makes this so remarkable is that the H1N1 strain in all three cases is virtually identical to the virus considered extinct in 1950, the AH1N1 flue variant. The New England Journal of Medicine comes to the conclusion that, since the two are virtually identical, and differ entirely from flu strains that have developed from 1950 onwards, the only reasonable explanation for its reappearance in all three cases is a laboratory accident. A virus does not survive that long in an unaltered state, entirely unaffected by mutation or change, without being frozen somewhere. If this current outbreak would be entirely natural, the viral strain observed cannot be this similar to the AH1N1 of the first half of the last century.
Also, as an aside, the first case of resistance to Tamiflu, the much heralded anti viral medicine, has been reported.
Make of this what you will.