Word: viruses
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...lands on our doorstep. "Now is the time to take the actions needed to prevent this," says Nathan Wolfe, director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, which looks for new pathogens emerging from wildlife. One way to start would be to trace how, when and where the H1N1 virus emerged from pigs into people (or vice versa - over the weekend, Canada confirmed reports that a swine worker in Alberta passed the H1N1 virus to pigs). The H1N1 virus contains human, avian and swine flu genes, and genetic analysis indicates that it reassorted years ago, meaning it could have been...
Given the speed with which the H1N1 flu virus spread around the world - and the relentlessness with which it has been tracked by the media - it can be hard to believe that less than two weeks have passed since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) first responded to reports of an unusual respiratory illness...
...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...
...scientists from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Organization for Animal Health and the Mexican government is now beginning an investigation in Mexico, taking blood samples and swabbing the inside of pigs' nostrils, looking for H1N1 infection. The hope is to find out how prevalent the virus is among Mexican pigs - if at all - and begin to trace back the virus...
...easy. It took years to find the original animal sources of SARS and HIV, among other new diseases. What makes tracking emerging viruses inside wildlife populations all the more difficult is that animals - even more than people - move around a lot, across borders. The U.S. imports live pigs from Europe, while Mexico takes in some 600,000 pigs a year from the U.S., so it's entirely possible that the virus began in Europe (the H1N1 virus has Eurasian genes), then moved to America and Mexico with pigs before infecting the first human. "It's going to take several weeks...