Have you heard any theories about HOW these strains (seeing as only two of the animal flu strains occur in the Americas naturally), combined with European/Asian Swine flu virus(es), and the Human Flu strain, though?
From what I know about “Old fashioned” swine flu is that you can get it from exposure to an infected animal. It is an upper respiratory infection. And, it is also only communicable from animal-to-human, and not human-to-human.
I can see how the RNA marker in the human flu virus could be the way this made the jump to human-to-human transmission capability, but are they suggesting that (kind of like the life by chance from a pool of goo theory) this just happened to “stew” in a pond of pig poop?
I’m no expert, but that sounds rather odd to me... And it seems that the combinations/mutations happened too quickly for it to have followed a natural “evolutionary/mutation” path that most viruses follow.
Again, I’m no expert, so I’d love more info. if you have it. Perhaps I’m just missing something here, or not understanding this well enough.
I’m not really trying to make the case for the pond/hog farm theory. I do want to make it clear, the public health agency didn’t tie it directly to the pond, put more a possibility of the farm playing in some way.
I would urge you to look around here. There are now articles out there claiming this is a real stew of an influenza virus, containing a mixture of several bad strains.
It doesn’t look good, and by it’s complexity does lend itself to the mad scientist scenario. I’m just not qualified to say yes or no. Mother nature tosses some pretty wild stuff our way sometimes, but scientists should be able to tell if this is a naturally occurring virus or not. At least I believe so in time.