Word: h5n1
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...seem to have abated in recent weeks, but scientists know the world is always one viral mutation away from a deadly pandemic. That fact has been driven home again by a worrying cluster of human bird flu cases in rural Indonesia that could represent the first time the H5N1 virus has managed to pass from human to human to human. The cluster likely began with a 37-year-old woman who hosted a family pork roast on April 29 in the Indonesian village of Kubu Sembilang in north Sumatra. The woman had become sick on April...
...study of fossils to the mapping of the genome, but it is also profoundly practical in application. Scientists are debating the likelihood and timing of a horrific pandemic caused by avian flu. Those who worry about that possibility and reject evolution live in a world of contradiction. If the H5N1 virus, the infective agent for avian flu, adopts a new lifestyle and moves directly from one human host to another, it would be because it evolved that capacity...
...Then there is the matter of having the right strains of virus in the vaccine should a human pandemic ever occur. The virus used to make the Sanofi Aventis vaccine came from a Vietnamese patient who was infected with H5N1 in 2004. The viruses from that sample are part of a group that scientists call clade 1. But the viruses that have recently spread so rapidly among birds from Asia to Europe and Africa are part of a new group called clade 2. Preliminary evidence suggests that there?s not a lot of cross-reactivity between the two clades. That...
...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...
...their cars) and entering the locations into large computerized databases for use in an emergency. They have even used the popular free software program Google Earth to fine-tune the positions of some chicken houses. That way, if the industry's testing program ever turns up evidence of H5N1 infection, officials will know exactly which flocks to sacrifice and where to draw the quarantine lines...