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Remember bird flu? New studies show you should still worry.
Bird flu is still out there and mutating into dangerous forms, but there’s good news too – the changes that could make it spread more easily could make it less deadly, researchers reported on Thursday.
Flu experts funded by the U.S. government published a long-awaited a study on H5N1 bird flu on Thursday, and some of their findings are sobering. It only takes a handful of mutations for the virus to become airborne and easily transmitted from one animal to another. And a second study shows those mutations not only can easily occur in nature – they have already started to do so.
“We now know that we're living on a fault line,” Derek Smith of Cambridge University in Britain, who worked on one of the studies published in the journal Science, told reporters in a teleconference. “It's an active fault line. It really could – it really could do something.”
Now here’s the reassuring part – the mutations that make the virus pass easily from one animal to another also make it a little less dangerous. Instead of taking root deep in the lungs, causing a hard-to-treat pneumonia, the mutated version of H5N1 likes to live in the upper respiratory tract.
“And so it's less likely to cause pneumonia,” said Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. And, Fouchier and colleagues reported in Science, drugs used to treat flu worked against the mutant version.
H5N1 bird flu has been circulating on and off since 1998, and it has killed nearly 60 percent of nearly 600 people reported infected, according to the World Health Organization. It mostly kills chickens and rarely infects people, but when it does, little can be done for the victims. Many experts believe H5N1 could be the source of the next big deadly pandemic, like those that struck in 1918, 1957 and 1968.
The last pandemic of a new flu was the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. It wasn’t nearly as deadly as other new flu viruses that cause pandemics, probably because it was a mutated form that included bits and pieces of flu viruses that had been infecting people for decades. That could lead people to believe that flu pandemics aren’t that big a deal. But H5N1 is a completely new virus to the human body – one reason it kills such a high percentage of its human victims.
Luckily, the infection doesn’t spread well from birds to people or from one person to another. But like all versions of the flu virus, it evolves and mutates in several different ways. Scientists have been working for years to figure out just which mutations would give H5N1 the ability to spread easily from one person to another, while also staying deadly. The latest work uses ferrets, which get infected with flu in a way very similar to how people get infected.
The work concerned some experts, and last December a committee called the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked two teams of researchers to hold off on publishing their findings. The U.S. government also asked all flu researchers to agree to a moratorium on genetically changing flu viruses until ground rules could be agreed on. The worry was that the virus could escape and accidentally cause a pandemic or, worse, that terrorists could somehow get hold of the work and use it to make a biological weapon. But the restrictions caused a furor among researchers, who are used to freely sharing their research.
The biosecurity board agreed earlier this year to let the researchers publish their findings.
“It's our hope that (Thursday’s) publication will help to make the world safer, particularly by stimulating many more scientists and policymakers to focus on preparing defenses,” Bruce Alberts editor-in-chief of Science, told the teleconference.
Some of the conclusions from the batch of studies: governments need to loosen rules for drug companies to make it easier and faster to make vaccines against flu; researchers – most funded by governments – need to keep a closer eye on bird flu around the world to watch for the mutations; and the benefits of flu research far outweigh the risks.
“The reason that we accelerated research on influenza is because there's a real threat,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which paid for the controversial flu studies.
Related stories:
Controversial bird flu study published after terrorism debate
Should scientists create deadly viruses? Yes, says bioethicist
Leave a Comment:
Any disease that quickly kills its host is not a very successful creature - works against its own survival. Makes sense it would adapt so that hosts live to enable it to spread and survive.
In many cases it is just the opposite. The death of the host means release of the vector - thus more spreading. In biology survival of the species trumps survival of an individual.
That is what I was thinking. Ebola is just a dunb virus if that were the issue. Though you dont want to be in the neighborhood when thats near somehow.
poor ferrets.....
This is just wishful thinking on their part, Bubonic Plague is alive and deadly in northern Arizona, along with Hanta Virus and a man died of it " B Plague" in Oregon recently after being bit by a cat. "We're the Government we will protect you, go back to sleep.
Of course those diseases are still around. No one including the government, CDC or WHO have said they have disappeared. They actually occur at pretty high rates in India (plague) and in Central/South America (hanta). The big difference with those particular diseases is that we now know (compared to the Dark Ages) where it comes from and how to decrease the chances of infection.
the flu, like most other diseases, mutates all the time. I believe that without vacines there would eventually be imunities built up against 99% of them. the rest would be either deadly or like the common cold.
I have only had the flu once in my 52 years, at about 8, and have never had a flu shot. everyone I know that has had a flu shot has also gotten the flu. more than just coincidence.
Being that you are 1 person with a small set of friends, no, it's not more than just coincidence.
redbloodedAZn8v
Vaccines have saved millions and continue to do so. I have never had influenza and I have been vaccinated every year. However personal stories do not make scientific proof.
Getting a vaccine doesn't mean you won't come in contact with or get the illness, it only allows your body to start building its defenses prior to contact with the actual illness in order to decrease the severity and possible dangers of the symptoms.
and natural selection means only the fittest continue the species. explain supper bugs, you know the ones that have developed because the use of vaccines and anti-biotics? these mande made disasters are a dirrect result of mans interference with nature.
We're still talking about Bird Flu?
yup
It serves as a powerful research tool into modelling how influenza mutates and what made this particular type so deadly in humans.
This research may help to reduce or prevent future pandemics.
I think one day there will be a virus or bacteria that scientists won't be able to vaccinate most of us against in time. Nature always culls down the population of things to keep life in balance .
With over 7 plus billion people in the world..we are probably long over due.
Except if that Life can override nature with science.
Once again the "Oh my God!" moment becomes the "It's not as bad as we thought" moment. In a couple of years it will be a "Can you believe we actually worried about that?" moment. Silly humans, always thinking the sky is falling.
Yeah they probably thought that during the Spanish Influenza Pandemic around 1917 when 19,000,000 people in the US alone died.-How silly!
What a complete moron. (rolls eyes)
Don't worry...the sneezing bird said it was just a allergy...then he died...
How do you know the virus wont be more contagious, and MORE deadly ?
It must be Bush's fault.........."A Kinder Gentler Flu". lol.........
It was created by the Government.......sounds crazy but look it up on the conspiracy behind this BS!!!!
you can find a conspiracy theory behind every event... the only thing they tell us is that people will go to absurd length to justify their paranoia.
Truth is the method of vaccine manufacture for H5N1 was probably the best "mistake" that could have happened. Although it is still not widely accepted as a mistake, it probably caused the mutation that made it less deadly to occur on a larger scale and replicated it faster, than in nature. Sometimes the scientists get lucky. Since they do not have knowledge or understanding of immunity, luck is all we have!
" Since they do not have knowledge or understanding of immunity, luck is all we have!"
Yes they do. That how we've been able to develop vaccines and treat/prevent many diseases.
The best way is to increase the bodies own defense mechanism with a healthy gut.
A Drug Cure will always come too late to save Humanity
In 1997 the pandemic was stopped in its tracks in Hong Kong. The system adopted was not reliant upon a drug cure but that prevention was better than cure. It worked and Ken Shortridge who devised the strategy was given the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize in medicine, The Prince Mahidol Award. By doing this Prof. Shortridge stopped a bird flu pandemic starting and which had the propensity to kill millions (the only one ever to do so and prevent the deaths of incalculable numbers). The premise was, ‘don’t let it start in the first place’. Why has the establishment therefore forgotten the first dictum of medical health that ‘prevention is better than cure?’
So why have those who are advocating a drug cure not taken on-board this system that has worked? This question is postulated because the Swine Flu pandemic showed that with reference to the Spanish Flu in 1918 which took up to 100 million lives, that a cure would come too late. In this respect it was not until 7 months 1 week that a vaccine was created and then it had to be manufactured and thereafter distributed to the masses (a logistics nightmare). In the second wave of the Spanish Flu, after the virus had mutated into a human-to-human killer, it did its worst between week 16 and week 26, some 1 month 1 week before a cure was found for the Swine Flu pandemic.
Therefore whatever way we look at it a drug vaccine will come too late to save us, no matter who you are from the president of the United States downwards. Fact not fiction.
Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO says that it is only a matter of time not when the killer virus will emerge - may be next week, next month, next year or whenever; but it will happen sometime and such a pandemic according to pandemic researchers is overdue. Therefore we living on borrowed time and we have to adopt Prof. Shortridge's strategy for the good of all humanity.
Dr David Hill
Chief Executive
World Innovation Foundation
I remember reading about when medicine took a road as to what doctrine they should use...rather than prevent they went with vaccines etc to treat the diseases instead of prevent them..forgot what the article was about but it mentioned Pasteur ...
drhill, Well said! I found H5N1 in 1996 in a swine herd. NO ONE was interested from ANY entity. There are dozens of situations where a researcher has the early warning signs ignored by the "establishment"! We have an immunity problem with livestock that is waiting to blow up. When over 65% of the research is controlled by and financed by big pharma it IS only a matter of time!
They should have followed Professor Antoine Bechamp theories instead of Pasteur's ,but it's the favored one the establishment follows.
more social engineering to scare the people into compliance
see raw milk raids, dollarhite rabbits, national animal id, mad sheep, to find out how people are being manipulated into believing lies and having our freedoms to choose legislated away (no nais dot org)
I'm glad that we know that evolution is just a "theory"! That way we don't ever have to worry about the crazy mutations these people are talking about!
From one point of view the failure to prepare is equal to preparing to fail. From another point of view, we may be preparing for a situation we created. The anthrax attacks were perpatrated using materials created in labs right under our noses. It really is a catch 22, the same fire that keeps you warm can burn your house down. Publishing this research is a risk that is unnecessary and unwarranted, as is the creation of biological and chemical weapons. Unfourtunately, that doesn't prevent our military from engaging in both.