What Will the Next Influenza Pandemic Look Like?

[tetano]

MALTA?Contagion, a film released earlier this month, depicts a gruesome outbreak of an exotic and deadly new virus. In the real world, a not-so foreign infection is circulating among animals every day of every year. If it picks up just a handful of certain mutations, it could start spreading among people, with a mortality rate as high as 60 percent. What is this potent virus? The flu.

Although the 2009 pandemic of influenza A H1N1 ended up being relatively mild?killing about one in 10,000 people who came down with it?it still claimed more than 14,000 lives across the globe. The relatively low mortality rate was a relief to forecasters because the outbreak's origin in Mexico and type had taken many by surprise.

Such surprises have turned out to be one of the few constants in the virus world: "Expect the unexpected," Ab Osterhaus, a professor of virology at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, said here Tuesday at the fourth European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI) conference.

The uncertainty factor makes global preparedness particularly challenging. And given the basic questions that remain to be answered?such as why some healthy people die of the flu and others do not?researchers are using new technologies to look for leads in victims as well as in the virus itself.


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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=next-influenza-pandemic

[Gert van der Hoek]

Re: What Will the Next Influenza Pandemic Look Like?

Another snip from the previous article, a spectaculair experiment by Ron Fouchier:

Fortunately, so far, it has not been transferred from human to human and has passed to us only via direct contact with animals. But any flu can change rapidly, mutating in each new host. So researchers wonder: Could the dreaded H5N1 ever morph into a disease that could spread among people, via a cough or sneeze, to attach to nasal or tracheal membranes, as the seasonal flu does every year?

To help answer this question, Ron Fouchier, also of Erasmus Medical Center, and his team "mutated the hell out of H5N1" and looked at how readily it would bind with cells in the respiratory tract. What they found is that with as few as five single mutations it gained the ability to latch onto cells in the nasal and tracheal passageways, which, Fouchier added as understated emphasis, "seemed to be very bad news."

The variety that they had created, however, when tested in ferrets (the best animal model for influenza research) still did not transmit very easily just through close contact.

It wasn't until "someone finally convinced me to do something really, really stupid," Fouchier said, that they observed the deadly H5N1 become a viable aerosol virus

. In the derided experiment, they let the virus itself evolve to gain that killer capacity. To do that, they put the mutated virus in the nose of one ferret; after that ferret got sick, they put infected material from the first ferret into the nose of a second. After repeating this 10 times, H5N1 became as easily transmissible as the seasonal flu.

The lesson from these admittedly high-risk experiments is that "the H5N1 virus can become airborne," Fouchier concluded—and that "re-assortment with mammalian viruses is not needed" for it to evolve to spread through the air. And each of these mutations has already been observed in animals. "The mutations are out there, but they have not gotten together yet," Osterhaus said.

[Giuseppe]

Re: What Will the Next Influenza Pandemic Look Like?

The best animal experiment is undergoing since 1997 and involves millions of people in endemic bird flu areas.

Some of these 'enhanced' transmissibility viruses were and are around and replicate into human noses unnoticed perhaps every day, hour and minute too.

The constraint behind current bird flu virus inability to cause community outbreaks is thus unknown, despite the great number of in-vivo experiments done so far (with some degree of danger).

Our purpose should be to limit the H5N1 transmission to poultry from wild birds and from poultry to human, in first instance.

Another thing should be to vaccinate people in endemic region with current trivalent seasonal influenza vaccines to prevent co-infections with human and animal viruses.

The reality is - however -another.

In most of the countries and regions affected endemically by H5N1 in poultry, civil unrests, poverty, corruption, lack of resources make at least impossible the epizootics control.

Affluent countries - now engaged in massive public budget cuts - are leaving impoverished regions of the world without the needed assistance, both financial and technical.

One of the main objection to past years bird flu fanfare was the fact that for a single H5N1 human case there was an international experts meeting but the field assistance was dramatically lacking.

Despite several hurdles, such as patents on drugs and vaccines for human and animal use, test kits and no money to refund bird flu hit farmers, in some regions the disease was partially controlled with a dramatic reduction in human cases and deaths.

Swinging the head elsewhere, for the 'affluent' part of the world, is economically improductive - if we are seeing the emerging diseases as one of the major threat for our civilization.

Mixing fiction, dangerous lab experiments and foolish budget cuts may result in loss for the entire human community (IOH).

[Laidback Al]

Re: What Will the Next Influenza Pandemic Look Like?

Giuseppe makes some important points that are worth repeating ? H5N1 is endemic in poultry populations in several of the most densely populated countries in the world. Each day is a new ?laboratory experiment? for the H5N1 virus and human transmission. It has successfully infected more than 500 people around the world, it just has not yet become an easily transmissible pandemic virus.

The economic consequences of a virulent pandemic would be devastating to the world economy. Now is the time that world governments should be developing a coordinated financial safety net for countries with endemic H5N1. Funds should be provided to assist these countries in developing better testing procedures, better surveillance strategies, and better plans for containment once H5N1 starts to spread H2H.

[tetano]

Re: What Will the Next Influenza Pandemic Look Like?

Five easy mutations to make bird flu a lethal pandemic


26 September 2011 by Debora MacKenzie
Magazine issue 2831. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Epidemics and Pandemics and Bird Flu Topic Guides

Editorial: "The risk of an influenza pandemic is fact, not fiction"

H5N1 bird flu can kill humans, but has not gone pandemic because it cannot spread easily among us. That might change: five mutations in just two genes have allowed the virus to spread between mammals in the lab. What's more, the virus is just as lethal despite the mutations.

"The virus is transmitted as efficiently as seasonal flu," says Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who reported the work at a scientific meeting on flu last week in Malta.

"This shows clearly that H5 can change in a way that allows transmission and still cause severe disease in humans. It's scary," says Peter Doherty, a 1996 Nobel prizewinner for work in viral immunology.

H5N1 evolved in poultry in east Asia and has spread across Eurasia since 2004. In that time 565 people are known to have caught it; 331 died. No strain that spreads readily among mammals has emerged in that time, despite millions of infected birds, and infections in people, cats and pigs. Efforts to create such a virus in the lab have failed, and some virologists think H5N1 simply cannot do it.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128314.600-five-easy-mutations-to-make-bird-flu-a-lethal-pandemic.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

[Giuseppe]

Re: What Will the Next Influenza Pandemic Look Like?

Every day H5N1 is in contact - othen than millions of chickens - with cats, dogs, a number of humans from Egypt to Indonesia (millions?) and it is around since 1996, at least.

Every day, thus, H5N1 is doing experiments in-vivo to adapt to new hosts.

Every day the Rubik Cube of mutations is operating. So predictions are open but useless.

We need quick detection of human cases, better therapeutical protocols, cheap and effective drugs and a serious plan for reduce human-animal contacts...

Where are the moneys, please?

[Laidback Al]

Re: What Will the Next Influenza Pandemic Look Like?

H5N1 bird flu can kill humans, but has not gone pandemic because it cannot spread easily among us. That might change: five mutations in just two genes have allowed the virus to spread between mammals in the lab. What's more, the virus is just as lethal despite the mutations.

Every day H5N1 is in contact - other than millions of chickens - with cats, dogs, a number of humans from Egypt to Indonesia (millions?) and it is around since 1996, at least.

Every day, thus, H5N1 is doing experiments in-vivo to adapt to new hosts. . .

As has been previously noted, H5N1 is a zoonosis. It can infect multiple species including a wide variety of domestic poultry and wild birds, insects, and mammals; not just humans, but leopards, tigers, rats, pigs, foxes, cows, and others.

see: http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15063

Although most confirmed human H5N1 cases are associated with sick or dead poultry, transmission of a reassorted H5N1 virus to humans could occur from any of these species -- and the next time it jumps it could be H2H transmissible.

[gsgs]

Re: What Will the Next Influenza Pandemic Look Like?

repeat that experiment in other animals (swine,dogs,cats,duck

try to attenuate the virus while keeping its transmissiability
can't we just cut the cleavage site ?

we could make the virus less virulent, but better spreading and let it
spread in nature so to outperform the bad thing via immunity

how many mutations are needed to make normal seasonal flu a killer ?
what was the difference between 1918 first and 2nd wave,
how many mutations ?