Posted on 11/12/2005 10:05:25 PM PST by nickcarraway
HANOI (Reuters) - Scientists in Vietnam, where bird flu has killed 42 people, said the deadly H5N1 influenza virus had mutated into a more dangerous form that could breed more effectively in mammals, state media reported on Sunday.
The online newspaper Vnexpress quoted Cao Bao Van, director of the Molecule Biology Department of the Pasteur Institute, Vietnam's centre of bird flu research, as saying the decoding of 24 samples of the virus taken from poultry and humans showed significant antigen variation.
An antigen is any foreign substance that stimulates the body's immune system to produce antibodies.
A Vietnamese man seen standing behind a red cross at the National Institute for Clinical Research in Tropical Medicine, a hospice for infected bird flu patients, in Hanoi, Vietnam, inb this November 11, 2005 file photo. (REUTERS/Kham) Van said the study had showed an antigenic shift involving major antigenic changes of the influenza surface proteins, the HA and NA molecules. These changes can result in the appearance of pandemic viruses.
Van said the study had also found a mutation of the PB2 gene in a virus sample from a patient in Dong Thap, southern Vietnam, who died earlier this year. The mutation allows more effective breeding of the virus in mammals.
The function of the PB2 gene is not completely understood, but scientists believe it codes for an enzyme that helps force the host cell's molecular machinery to make more viruses.
While the study came to no conclusion on the virus's ability to move easily between people, it said the virus had developed resistance to anti-flu agents Amatadine and Rimantadine.
Vietnam, where the H5N1 virus has hit nine of the country's 64 provinces since returning in early October, has recorded 92 cases of human bird flu infection and 42 death.
Fortunately, the Kansas School Board will vote the avian flu out of existence.
bttt
This tells us nothing about the truth of common descent but your stupidity tells us a lot about the mindset of evolatriasts.
Well, since ALL influenza A isolates are mutating constantly, so much so that vaccine which is effective in November may be ineffective by February, we have another "bird flu" non-story.
Which was published in 2001.
Get a clue, VNexpress.
Are you denying that the flu is evolving?
I thought the media was already a bird flu mutation
The virus is mutating and adapting, and so would it appear is your argument.
> your stupidity tells us a lot about the mindset of evolatriasts.
"Evolatriasts?"
Your immediate leaping to lame insults tells us much about the thought processes of Creatiahoosifudges, too.
For a country as populous as they are, I think they don't mind if several million of their own citizens get wiped out in the process. After all, this is a country with strict reproductive laws.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this recombination, i.e. the swapping of whole genes? Isn't this the more feared scenario as opposed to insertions, deletions, single nucleotide polymorphisms, etc.?
bttt
Your connection of Kansas School board to avian flu mutations speaks for itself. It is a stupid connection to draw.
I jumped to no conclusions I simply commented on the stupidity of the statement.
Funny how your little ping list never self corrects. Show me ten examples of you guys correcting each other in all your thousands of threads. On the contrary, the rest of FR is full of conservatives correcting each other and thanking each other for it.
Intellectual integrity is not part of your evolutionary grid.
> Your connection of Kansas School board to avian flu mutations speaks for itself. It is a stupid connection to draw.
Connecting evolution to evolution is stupid?
You're something else, I'll grant you that.
Refusal to honestly deal with your opponents views is evidence of your intellectual insecurity.
> Refusal to honestly deal with your opponents views ...
Which I've not been doing. You immediately leaped to the conclusion that linking evolution with evolution is "stupid." That is *your* problem with intellectual insecurity.
No, I pointed to your obvious stupidity in asserting some relevance between the positions of the Kansas School Board and the mutation of avian flu strains.
You neither support the idiotic connection nor clarify. You simply assert.
I did jump to the conclusion that it was stupidity rather than reading comprehension or training in logic. But that has been proved as we go along here.
By the way, I'm still waiting for that list of examples where you evolatriasts actually correct each other. Not expecting much since it is a backslapping club with no desire to address reality.
> I pointed to your obvious stupidity in asserting some relevance between the positions of the Kansas School Board and the mutation of avian flu strains.
Both are about evolution.
Time for you to grow up, son.
> I'm still waiting for that list of examples where you evolatriasts actually correct each other.
No "evolatriasts" around here.
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