Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger on: Goals of Norway Team
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One of the stated goals of that team is to attempt to culture live virus from these samples. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely. So unlikely that it's almost unimaginably unlikely that live virus would be recovered. Influenza viruses are very fragile. And even if the bodies were preserved and frozen as they are in permafrost to retain some RNA of the virus, the genetic material, I think it's almost inconceivable that live virus would be obtained. It was the case in the 1950's exhumations, when the samples were only half as old as they are now, they were only 38 years old, that no live virus was obtained.
Anyway, they are going to attempt that. Those attempts would be done under extremely tight biosafety measures. That is, there are only a certain few laboratories in the world that have these extreme biosafety containment laboratories. The CDC in Atlanta being one of them. Fort Detrick in Maryland, the Army's facility, being another.
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