Wednesday, October 05, 2005
The next crisis: breaking news
Minutes ago I received this release from the Wall Street Journal suggesting that the Spanish Influenza of 1918 was, in fact, a mutated avian flu.
Another data point suggesting the threat is real.
For those looking for more information, the Wall Street Journal has an excellent compilation of Avian Flu related material. It can be found here for subscribers.
Two teams of scientists reported that they re-created the influenza virus that killed as many as 50 million people in 1918 and 1919. The findings suggest that the threat of an avian-flu pandemic might be greater than previously thought.
Researchers from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Mount Sinai School of Medicine said that the historic, killer flu bug strain probably originated as an avian bug and then spread in humans without undergoing complicated changes that many experts had thought necessary for a human pandemic.
The findings by Dr. Taubenberger and his team of researchers, published in Nature, follow a nine-year effort to decode the 1918 strain by sequencing its eight genes. The research concluded that the pandemic flu outbreak was most likely caused by an avian virus. The scientists also discovered 10 mutations that distinguish the 1918 virus from avian bugs, suggesting changes that the virus made to adapt to a human host, they said. They also noted that some of those mutations are also present in the currently circulating H5N1 virus, suggesting it could make the jump to humans in a similarly rapid and alarming way.
Another data point suggesting the threat is real.
For those looking for more information, the Wall Street Journal has an excellent compilation of Avian Flu related material. It can be found here for subscribers.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Oct 07, 08:22:00 AM:
Why would this originate only in Asia instead of other parts of the world?
