The Deadliest Virus Ever Known
Malcolm Gladwell on the Spanish-flu epidemic of 1918, which reached virtually every country, as the First World War came to an end, killing between twenty and forty million people.
On the 1918 Spanish flu preserved in permafrost: "The bodies of the seven miners may well be intact, cryogenically preserved in the tundra, and, if so, the flu virus they caught on board the Forsete—the deadliest virus that the world has ever known—may still be down there with them."