Word: h3n2
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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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...