Not a biologist, but aren't these mutations more or less a roll of the dice?
Seems that way but, the dice are rolling all the time. I've noticed that no-one recently has used the term, "It's not if, but when" as they once did in ever press release.
Regardless, I'm as ready as I'll ever be.
I posted before I saw your response, but that is where I was heading.
In business, we now do "risk management".
In simple terms, what are the chances that something bad will happen, what that bad thing would it cost us, and what will it cost us to mitigate this.
When it comes to H5N1, it is probably worth investing some money in risk mitigation, which would be vaccine research, drug research, potential quarantines, ...
Not a biologist, but aren't these mutations more or less a roll of the dice?
Yes and no. The formation (via mutation) of a new gene which performs a particular function is pretty much a "roll of the dice". But once various novel mutations have come into existence, they can float around in the organism's genepool indefinitely (although they can also become ubiquitous or be flushed out entirely). And in a case like this, any one gene isn't the problem -- the problem comes when you have a virus with a certain *combination* of abilities, which means it has acquired several genes which together give it all those abilities.
The biologist's comment in this story says that the first hurdle (the existence of genes which do the "parts" of the "bad combination") has already been achieved -- those genes already exist and are in various flu viruses "out there". The risk now is whether those genes come together in a single virus to give it the ability to become a pandemic. And while that doesn't happen every day, it is an "easier" (i.e. more likely) task than the formation of those "toolbox" genes in the first place.
And while viruses don't mix-and-match their genes via sexual reproduction like a great many organisms do, there's something called "lateral gene transfer" which often results in a similar kind of "gene trading". It's not uncommon to find viruses or bacteria which have acquired chunks of DNA from unrelated viruses/bacteria by this method.
So the big question is how soon, in the semi-random viral "swap meet" that goes on all the time in nature, will a H5N1 virus manage to get "lucky" enough to end up with the complete package of genes which would give it the ability become a human epidemic? Like any stochastic process (i.e. one which relies to some degree on random events), there's no way to say for sure -- it could happen tomorrow, or it might never happen. But the concern is that gene-trading in viruses happens often enough that there's a very significant chance of it happening sometime within the next 10 years or so. And if it does, the consequences are horrific enough that we need to be ready to jump on it the instant it does, in the hopes of snuffing out the first occurrence before it gets completely out of control.
Animals carry around a large number of different viruses at any given moment. Humans included. Viruses replicate in large numbers when a host immune system isn't prepared to snag the viral particles when they first arrive in small numbers. Mutation is a statistically small event. When you have millions or billions of viral particles, even a statistically small probability has an opportunity to demonstrate whether it is better than the rest of the non-mutant population. The better ones go on to dominate the population. Since generation times are very short for viruses, the evolution toward a more lethal strain can take place relatively quickly.