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Originally Posted by TriangleMan
The 1918 virus actually had a "small" death rate (I think around 5% of those infected died) while the current H5N1 virus' death rate may be higher. We currently have no immunity to H5N1 while in general the population does have some level of immunity to the 1918 virus, since the people it didn't kill went on to have children and passed on whatever genetic resistance we had to the virus. It is also possible, though I haven't looked it up, that less-nasty variants of the 1918 virus have been cirulating in the population ever since, thus allowing people to build up immunity to it.
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H5N1 has been extremely lethal to poultry with an incredibly high death rate on the order of 90%. That combined with the 30-50% fatality rate among known human cases has the experts quite concerned. Estimates for a pandemic are that the death rate could be as high as the 1918 H1N1 strain but no one expects it to be 30-50%.
You have to consider the death rate along with the case rate for it to have any meaning. Small Pox kills 30%, rabies kills almost 100%, and so on but it also matters how many people get infected. Mice were infected with the 1918 strain that was reconstructed and they turned out to shed very large numbers of virus. That likely contributed to the number of fatalities as much as the death rate.
There are some that are very unhappy not just that the 1918 virus was resurrected but that the genetic information was then made public and readily available. One can only hope other researchers will not be careless when they decide to repeat the research.