WASHINGTON ? Nearly a century after history’s most lethal flu faded away, survivors’ bloodstreams still carry super-potent protection against the 1918 virus, demonstrating the remarkable durability of the human immune system.

Scientists tested the blood of 32 people aged 92 to 102 who were exposed to the 1918 pandemic flu and found antibodies that still roam the body looking to strangle the old flu strain. Researchers manipulated those antibodies into a vaccine and found that it kept alive all the mice they had injected with the killer flu, according to a study published online Sunday in the journal Nature.

, a town improbably gets infected with the 1918 flu and the doctors treat everyone with the reluctantly donated blood of an old butler who survived the original pandemic, he said.

That prompted Altschuler, a professor of rehabilitation medicine who doesn’t normally study flu, to look into the idea of testing people more than 90 years old for antibodies. The National Institutes of Health, which paid for much of the study, connected Altschuler with experts in the field and he found the elderly antibody donors.

The findings make sense, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, who wasn’t involved with the study. Recent studies have estimated that the human immune system should last many decades, but this gives real proof, he said.

“This is the mother of all immunological memory here,” Fauci said.

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