> While it is popularly claimed that it is illegal to die in Longyearbyen, the wording of this claim is misleading. While it is not actually illegal to die in the town, there are no options for burial of bodies there (ashes can be buried with permission from the government) and residents considered terminally ill are typically required to move to the mainland. 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 five percent of the world's population in the 20th century.