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Dozens of researchers, including myself, worked for years to uncover that swine flu had leapt to humans from a pig in Mexico in 2009. We learned a lot about influenza evolution, pig farming, and outbreak risk along the way.
It was the spring of 2009; US President Barrack Obama was just settling into the White House when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) informed him that a new influenza A virus had suddenly appeared in kids in Southern California and was likely to spread around the world. The global pandemic that scientists feared had finally arrived, only no one predicted it would come from North America.
National security advisors and public health officials had been warning the White House for years that dangerous flu viruses were circulating in birds that were only a handful of mutations away from jumping to humans, potentially sparking a pandemic like the notorious 1918 influenza outbreak that claimed more than 20 million lives globally. But US health officials expected the next globe-trotting virus to arise in Asia, the hotbed of zoonotic pathogens such as H5N1, or “bird flu,” and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which nearly caused a pandemic. So they were caught off guard when cases of a new disease started appearing in children in San Diego in April 2009. Officials were doubly surprised when the virus came from pigs. All three influenza pandemics of the 20th century were bird strains.
Even more baffling, the virus had an unusual genome, with pieces derived from three different swine influenza lineages, including a Eurasian lineage not previously observed in the Americas. As the new virus spread around the globe, sickening millions and killing hundreds of thousands of otherwise young, healthy people, Obama’s advisors had no answers for how the unusual virus had evolved and where or when it jumped from animals to people. After diagnostic testing rolled out globally, it appeared that the epicenter of the pandemic had been in central Mexico.
Rumors began to circulate that the virus, which was spreading rapidly among humans through contact and aerosols, was engineered by human hands. The CDC scoffed, but the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it was seriously investigating a memo sent to the organization by Australian biologist Adrian Gibbs who laid out his evidence for why the virus was not of a natural origin but rather had leaked from a laboratory performing genetic experiments for vaccine production. Gibbs was considered a credible scientist who had participated in the development of the Roche anti-influenza drug Tamiflu. Scientists and public health officials shuddered. A manmade pandemic virus was the last thing the world needed. Years of progress against vaccine-preventable diseases had already been undone by British doctor Andrew Wakefield’s falsified autism-MMR link, which would not be retracted for another year, fully 12 years after its publication.
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It was the spring of 2009; US President Barrack Obama was just settling into the White House when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) informed him that a new influenza A virus had suddenly appeared in kids in Southern California and was likely to spread around the world. The global pandemic that scientists feared had finally arrived, only no one predicted it would come from North America.
National security advisors and public health officials had been warning the White House for years that dangerous flu viruses were circulating in birds that were only a handful of mutations away from jumping to humans, potentially sparking a pandemic like the notorious 1918 influenza outbreak that claimed more than 20 million lives globally. But US health officials expected the next globe-trotting virus to arise in Asia, the hotbed of zoonotic pathogens such as H5N1, or “bird flu,” and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which nearly caused a pandemic. So they were caught off guard when cases of a new disease started appearing in children in San Diego in April 2009. Officials were doubly surprised when the virus came from pigs. All three influenza pandemics of the 20th century were bird strains.
Even more baffling, the virus had an unusual genome, with pieces derived from three different swine influenza lineages, including a Eurasian lineage not previously observed in the Americas. As the new virus spread around the globe, sickening millions and killing hundreds of thousands of otherwise young, healthy people, Obama’s advisors had no answers for how the unusual virus had evolved and where or when it jumped from animals to people. After diagnostic testing rolled out globally, it appeared that the epicenter of the pandemic had been in central Mexico.
Rumors began to circulate that the virus, which was spreading rapidly among humans through contact and aerosols, was engineered by human hands. The CDC scoffed, but the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it was seriously investigating a memo sent to the organization by Australian biologist Adrian Gibbs who laid out his evidence for why the virus was not of a natural origin but rather had leaked from a laboratory performing genetic experiments for vaccine production. Gibbs was considered a credible scientist who had participated in the development of the Roche anti-influenza drug Tamiflu. Scientists and public health officials shuddered. A manmade pandemic virus was the last thing the world needed. Years of progress against vaccine-preventable diseases had already been undone by British doctor Andrew Wakefield’s falsified autism-MMR link, which would not be retracted for another year, fully 12 years after its publication.
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