A popular claim made about the town is that it is illegal to die there but the wording in such a claim is misleading. While it is not actually illegal to die in Longyearbyen, there are no options for burial there and residents considered terminal are typically flown to Oslo to live out the remainder of their days. The decision to disallow burials came in 1950, when it was discovered that the bodies of residents who had died as a result of the 1918 flu pandemic had not begun to decompose. Today, scientists fear that the corpses, having been preserved by the permafrost in which they were buried, may still contain live strains of that same virus that killed 5% of the world's population in the 20th century.