Word: h3n2
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...team of scientists from the U.S., Indonesia and Japan, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, combined a strain of the deadly H5N1 avian virus with strains of H3N2 human seasonal flu, creating 254 new, mutated viruses. By injecting them in lab mice, researchers found that some of the hybrid viruses were both deadly (like bird flu) and transmissible (like seasonal human flu) - the kind of genetically mutated superflu viruses that experts have been warning about for decades. (See how to prevent illness...
...scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention generated artificially combined H5N1 and H3N2 viruses in a lab, but the resulting hybrids were all less deadly than the original bird flu strain. That led to hopes that the H5N1 virus simply lacked the ability to be a true pandemic killer and that to become more transmissible, it would necessarily have to become less dangerous...
...PNAS study undermines that hope. The key difference in this study was the presence of a single gene from the H3N2 human virus: the PB2 protein, which gave the hybrid viruses the ability to spread easily among the lab mice. Scientists think the protein may allow hybrid viruses to grow more efficiently in the lower temperatures of the upper respiratory tract, from which the virus can more easily spread to others. (The H5N1 virus tends to infect the lower respiratory tract in humans, where it can't easily get out and spread...
...poultry farmers have already learned that hard lesson, having faced outbreaks of other avian flus as recently as 2002 and 2004. H5N1 is only one of more than 100 subtypes of the influenza A virus. The majority of the subtypes are found in birds. A few, such as H3N2 and H1N1, have adapted to infect humans. The 2002 avian outbreak, which struck in Virginia, was the H7N2 subtype, and it illustrated the importance of early detection. "The outbreak was not contained in time and spread to 200 farms up and down the Shenandoah Valley," says Lobb...
...around 30% of school-age children were affected. It arrived in Ireland in early September and soon spread to Britain, where it has killed six children. Simultaneously it appeared in Spain, Portugal and Norway, and is now spreading across the rest of Europe. In France, a different strain, the "H3N2" variant, combined with gastroenteritis, has laid low up to 2 million people. Eleven children have died from a severe outbreak of flu in the U.S. Health authorities in Europe say the numbers are higher than average, but not excessively. They are at a loss to explain...