Word: h5n1
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...should we spend scarce medical resources swabbing the inside of pigs' nostrils, looking for viruses? Because new pathogens--including H5N1 bird flu, SARS, even HIV--incubated in animal populations before eventually crossing over to human beings. In the ecology of influenza, pigs are particularly key. They can be infected with avian, swine and human flu viruses, making them virological blenders. While it's still not clear exactly where the H1N1 virus originated or when it first infected humans, if we had half as clear a picture of the flu viruses circulating in pigs and other animals...
H1N1 has already jumped out of animals and established itself in people, so it's too late to contain it, but there are new viruses brewing all the time in the animal world. That includes H5N1 bird flu, which is simmering in Asia and Africa and could still mutate and trigger a pandemic. Globalization has made us especially vulnerable to new diseases--the right pathogen in the right place could spread around the world in 24 hours--but it also gives us the tools to form an effective defense. "The fact that the world is one continuous village now means...
...unlike diseases like foot and mouth, swine flu is not an infection that is automatically reported to national health authorities. Flu is common among pigs but not much more deadly than it usually is among people. (The H5N1 bird flu virus, by comparison, destroys poultry populations.) That means that flu infections in swine herds can easily fall under the radar, as seems to have been the case with the new H1N1. Though there were sporadic reports of flu infections passing from pigs to people over the past few years, "we hadn't seen anything that tipped us off that this...
...viruses that triggered pandemics over the past century - the catastrophic 1918 flu, but also the 1957 and 1968 pandemics - had a particular mutation in the gene that makes a protein called PB1-F2. The H1N1 virus also seems to lack mutations that make the especially virulent H5N1 avian flu, which has killed more than half the people with confirmed infections. (See pictures of the effects of swine flu in Mexico...
...power to spread to other mammals, like us. That's what makes pigs such potent mixing bowls for flu. The roundabout bird-pig-human route may be less common than the straight bird-human jump, but it may be more problematic. Strains of avian flu, like the much-feared H5N1, can infect individual humans, but they can't make the person-to-person leap. Avian flu that is passed through the pig's mammalian system, however, can be passed readily among humans. (Read "Why Border Controls Can't Keep Out the Flu Virus...