Word: reassorting
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...deaths thus far in Mexico - have been found in people who are relatively young, which is unusual for the flu, or why this strain seems to be spreading at a time of year when the flu usually levels off. "These viruses mutate, these viruses change, these viruses can further reassort with other genetic material," said Michael Ryan, the WHO's global alert and response director. "So it would be imprudent at this point to take too much reassurance." (Read "CDC Readies Swine Flu Vaccine...
Birds are the natural reservoirs of the common flu strains that strike in winter - and those strains reassort themselves to hit humans particularly hard. But while humans are not susceptible to every strain of avian flu, pigs definitely are. When bird flu viruses replicate in pigs, they pick up the viral machinery that gives more selective flu strains the 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...
Shortridge and Webster immediately recognized the gravity of the chicken-flu outbreak in Hong Kong, at least for the region's chicken industry. They knew that while avian influenza did not ordinarily make its host sick, a benign virus could reassort to produce a pathogen of almost inconceivable lethality. Webster's Memphis lab had observed such a transformation in the wild on two occasions, the first in April 1983, when a relatively mild influenza struck chickens on the vast chicken farms of Pennsylvania. The birds got visibly sick, some died and egg production fell, but overall the outbreak remained only...
...fact that the new virus did not seem readily transmittable from person to person was a consolation, but flu experts know that influenza viruses are utterly unpredictable. In Hong Kong the big question was this: Would the H5 reassort with a common human strain to produce a new virus that was as lethal as H5 but could be passed along by a human sneeze? Or would this new H5 virus, through repeated exposure, find some other way to adapt to human hosts? "That's an interesting point," says Shortridge, "because it raises questions about the 1918 pandemic. Did a similar...
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