Posted on 10/05/2005 11:21:05 AM PDT by BurbankKarl
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.
Their findings, published today in the journals Nature and Science, create "cause for concern" and make getting to the bottom of the 1918 flu outbreak far more than an historical exercise, said Jeffery Taubenberger, the Armed Forces Institute researcher who led one of the studies.
Fears are growing over the continuing spread of avian flu, which has become widespread in poultry flocks and is jumping to humans with increasing frequency. The lethal strain, known as H5N1, has claimed 60 lives in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia since late 2003.
Most of those cases were in people who had direct contact with infected poultry, but fears are growing that the highly contagious virus could mutate and begin spreading between humans. President Bush said on Tuesday that he would consider using the military to enforce quarantines in the event of an outbreak in the U.S.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Ho hum.
Women and children hit hardest.......ACK!
A little bird flu never hurt anybody.
Birds typically have a body temperature of 102. When suffering from a virus, their body temp can rise to 107 to fend off the virus.
Humans kill viruses by raising their body temperature to 102 or 103.
A bird-flu would likely survive temperatures of 104-105 which would cause irreparable damage to the human body.
This is the issue... a virus that is human-borne which can survive extreme body temperatures.
...except for the 50,000,000 or so people who died of it back around 1918.
If I get avian flu, I guess there's no point in eating chicken soup to recover.
Aha, that explains why humans have such a hard time dealing with that sort of virus. Thanks for the info.
"Doomed, I tells ya, Doomed!"- Homer Simpson.
I would hope the world is working on producing a vaccine 24 and 7 right now. This is no joking matter to be taken lightly. It should be getting every bit of funding that it needs.
I wish I could get my hands on some of that 1918 stuff. Excellent vintage. The strain I picked up in Phnom Phen last month, that was good, nicely infectious, an assertive joint inflamation, but it lacked the sophisticated bouquet of the legendary 1918 illness. Oh sure, there could be some mutations that make the 2005 Avian into an all time great pandemic, but I'm not optimistic.
Owl_Eagle(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
Big Party at the Club of Rome's funhouse tonight.
How does the flu kill? Is it the high fever, fluid in the lungs, or something else?
The bird flue virus has not evolved to a human transmissable form, yet. until that happens, any vaccine developoed today would be specificn against the un-mutated bird virus and not the type that is extremely virulent against humans. Once that mutation has occurred, then vaccine development is possible. You can't create a vaccince for a disease that does not yet exist.
Besides the body temperature issues, do not forget that a newly evolved human-bird flue virus will face no resistnace from the human immune system. Since no human has every been exposed to this virus, the human immune system is unprepared for infection. Other flu viruses that have been around for a while are self-similar enough that a healthy adult will have some immune response to it. THis new bug is just that - new. Survivors will have some immunity to future variations, but not to the initial pandemic.
Could someone explain to a simple old me why recreating a virus that killed tens of thousands of people was a GOOD idea?!?
>>>Could someone explain to a simple old me why recreating a virus that killed tens of thousands of people was a GOOD idea?!?>>>
To see how and why it mutates into a human to human virus from a bird to bird or bird to human virus.
My guess by recreating the virus, they can extract the DNA and use it create vaccines. But just my guess.
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