Never-Before-Seen Form of the Flu That Combines Pig, Bird and Human Viruses
April 24th, 2009UPDATE: MEXICO CITY SUSPENDS CLASSES AT SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES
Via: AP:
Mexico City has suspended classes at schools and universities to contain what could be a new flu strain.
Health Secretary Jose Cordova says private and public schools in this metropolis of 20 million have been ordered to remain closed Friday. The measure could be extended in coming days.
Cordova says the flu is a “new, different strain that can attack anyone.” He says authorities are investigating whether it is related to a unique new form of swine flu reported in Texas and California. All seven people in the U.S. recovered.
The government says at least 20 people have died nationwide from the flu in the last three weeks, 13 of them in Mexico City.
The total number of cases is estimated to be more than 800.
—End Update—
Via: AP:
Health officials are investigating a never-before-seen form of the flu that combines pig, bird and human viruses and which has infected seven people in California and Texas. All the victims recovered, but the cases are a growing medical mystery because it’s unclear how they caught the virus.
None of the seven people were in contact with pigs, which is how people usually catch swine flu. And only a few were in contact with each other, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Still, health officials said it’s not a cause for public alarm: The five in California and two in Texas have all recovered, and testing indicates some mainstream antiviral medications seem to work against the virus.
Dr. Anne Schuchat of the CDC said officials believe it can spread human-to-human, which is unusual for a swine flu virus.
The CDC is checking people who have been in contact with the seven confirmed cases, who all became ill between late March and mid-April.
Because of intensive searching, it’s likely health officials will find additional cases, said Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
CDC officials detected a virus with a unique combination of gene segments that have not been seen in people or pigs before. The bug contains human virus, avian virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.
Health officials have seen mixes of bird, pig and human virus before, but never such an intercontinental combination with more than one pig virus in the mix.
Scientists keep a close eye on flu viruses that emerge from pigs. The animals are considered particularly susceptible to both avian and human viruses and a likely place where the kind of genetic reassortment can take place that might lead to a new form of pandemic flu, said Dr. John Treanor, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
The virus may be something completely new, or it may have been around for a while but was only detected now because of improved lab testing and disease surveillance, CDC officials said.
The virus was first detected in two children in southern California — a 10-year-old boy in San Diego County and a 9-year-old girl in neighboring Imperial County.
The cases were detected under unusual circumstances. One was seen at a Navy clinic that participates in a specialized disease detection network, and the other was caught through a specialized surveillance system set up in border communities, CDC officials said.
On Thursday, investigators said they had discovered five more cases. That includes a father and his teenage daughter in San Diego County, a 41-year-old woman in Imperial County (the only person hospitalized), and two 16-year-old boys who are friends and live in Guadalupe County, Texas, near San Antonio.
The Texas cases are especially puzzling. One of the California cases — the 10-year-old boy — traveled to Texas early this month, but that was to Dallas, about 270 miles northeast of San Antonio. He did not travel to the San Antonio area, Schuchat said.
The two 16-year-olds had not traveled recently, Texas health officials said.
The swine flu’s symptoms are like those of the regular flu, mostly involving fever, cough and sore throat, though some of the seven also experienced vomiting and diarrhea.
CDC are not calling it an outbreak, a term that suggests ongoing illnesses. It’s not known if anyone is getting sick from the virus right now, CDC officials said.
It’s also not known if the seasonal flu vaccine that Americans got last fall and early this year protects against this type of virus. People should wash their hands and take other customary precautions, CDC officials said.
U.S. health officials are consulting with Mexican and Canadian health officials, and the CDC is beginning to receive samples from Mexico for testing, a CDC spokesman said. The ethnicity of the seven confirmed cases was not disclosed.
If this thing WASN’T engineered then I’m a psychopathic Sheik in the United Arab Emirates….
Somebody’s gonna make OODLES on the vaccine! Win-win!
Dear Sheik Lagavulin. I can assure you that we would never participate in any activity leading to the accidental release of this novel organism. Sinerely yours. Cpt. Obvious, Dept. of Cover-Ups and White-Washing
BBC are reporting 56 dead from it so far, and cases in California being reported.
Okay, so the obvious questions are:
1.) Is this natural or an engineered virus? It IS possible that it is natural, for the Spanish Flu was a combination of avian/swine flu that incorporated human genes as it switched species. We are seriously overdue for a flu pandemic.
2.) Why is it happening so late in the season? We are well past prime flu season. The ideal time to release such a virus would be Feb/March, when most of the northern hemispehre is cooped inside in close quarters and immune systems are all ready strained from all the bugs that have gone round. That’s a factor that might indicate it’s natural.
3.) How contagious is it, and what’s the incubation time? What’s the transmission rate?
4.) What’s the natural mortality rate? Everyone in the U.S. has recovered so far, but they’re dealing with isolated cases and not an epidemic. 60 people dead out of 800 infected is slightly less than 10%. Assuming (and it’s a rather large assumption at this time) that those figures are accurate, while it’s higher than the regular flu it won’t be true pandemic/kill-off level. If I were designing such a virus (ha ha) I wouldn’t be satisfied with less than a 50% transmission rate and a 20% kill rate, so as to take out at least 10% of the population.
5.) Who is getting sick, and who is dying? Older people and children get sick and/or die from the regular flu most often. The truly dangerous* viruses are those that take out healthy adults.
*from a public health/pandemic planning POV
6.) How far has it spread? Mexico, Texas, and California certainly, but where else? How fast is it spreading?
7.) Finally, why does the State Department have its head up its butt? A potentailly devastating new virus that has motivated the WHO (that bastion of slow-moving conservatism) to call an emergency meeting, and they can’t even issue a travel advisory?
There’s a lot of questions here. We’ll see what this leads to.
ok. a bit of a confessional, here.
Once upon a time, I participated in a gedankenexperiment / exercise which tested the proposed use of various bio-agents being released into the civilian populations of target countries with the objective being not death, but incapacitation. We concluded that the minimum time of exposure to produce the desired amplification in the target population was 90 days. Although isolated cases would appear before 90 days, sufficient rates of morbidity would not be produced before then, given typical host populations.
It is widely known that most governments / agencies / ubermensch are predicting an interesting summer. How many days are there before we reach the height of summer ?
Kevin, I have some specific advice to give re a product I am reasonably confident is effective against this. I am not sure I am permitted to plug a product in an open forum, if you would please advise, I’d sincerely appreciate it.
cybele
@ dagobaz
Feel free to let it rip.