Word: h5n1
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...says the nightmare scenario would involve the pandemic appearance of the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza. With a mortality rate of more than 60%, the virus is so dangerous to humans that his team can work with it only in biosecurity Level 4 laboratories, the highest level of biological containment available. So far, H5N1 is passed to humans only from birds and is not transmissible between humans. But if it were to swap genes with another influenza virus, possibly H1N1 (through, for example, a patient who contracts the two illnesses simultaneously), a new, more lethal pandemic strain could emerge with...
...Friday morning, the government is expected to adopt a set of guidelines to fight the flu at the recently established Headquarters for Countermeasures Against Influenza A (H1N1) in Tokyo. The new guidelines will be a modification of an existing plan created to counter the more virulent H5N1 virus, known as avian...
...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...