"This virus is quite different from what we see with the standard annual flu...because of the cytokine storm [a fatal immune response] it causes. In 1918, the vast majority of the people who died were healthy young people, 20 to 40 years of age...

If you put 1918 H1N1 into animal models at very, very low doses, it basically kills all of them in 24 hours. The lab science people had never seen that... The only virus that was similar was H5N1, and it was fatal at much lower doses. H5N1 is the most powerful influenza virus we've seen in modern human history."

-- Dr. Michael Osterholm, City Pages interview, 2006-03