From the closing of borders to mandatory quarantines, governments around the world are taking drastic steps to try to contain the coronavirus pandemic. Past outbreaks provide a blueprint for ...

The 1918 influenza pandemic remains the deadliest in modern history, killing tens of millions — and leaving scientists with enduring questions about how it began. A century later, a virologist and ...

A pair of lungs preserved over a century ago from a deceased Spanish flu patient has helped unravel the genetic adaptations undergone by the virus to spread across Europe during the start of the 1918 ...

A version of this story appears in the September 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine. Philadelphia detected its first case of a deadly, fast-spreading strain of influenza on September 17, 1918.

The preserved lung of an 18-year-old Swiss man has been used to create the full genome of the 1918 "Spanish flu," the first complete influenza A genome with a precise date from Europe. It offers new ...

A pair of lungs preserved over a century ago from a deceased Spanish flu patient has helped unravel the genetic adaptations undergone by the virus to spread across Europe during the start of the 1918 ...