Word: avians
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...viruses that triggered pandemics over the past century - the catastrophic 1918 flu, but also the 1957 and 1968 pandemics - had a particular mutation in the gene that makes a protein called PB1-F2. The H1N1 virus also seems to lack mutations that make the especially virulent H5N1 avian flu, which has killed more than half the people with confirmed infections. (See pictures of the effects of swine flu in Mexico...
...Once Calderón's administration learned on April 23 that it was dealing with a new flu virus type - A/H1N1, a unique mix of swine, avian and human strains - it moved swiftly to control its spread. As of Saturday night, the official number of confirmed swine-flu cases in Mexico stood at 473, less than a third of early estimates, and the death toll was only 19. (Health officials have stopped publicly tallying suspected cases; there are still so many garden-variety flu cases that they felt continued reporting of suspected cases of swine flu would unnecessarily...
...Despite several countries' bans on pork imports, it's important to remember that the disease cannot be contracted by eating pork.) The original reservoir for flu viruses is actually wild birds, which can spread infection to domestic birds and people - as we saw with the H5N1 avian flu in Asia - and to pigs. Pigs make particularly good biological mixing bowls since they can be infected by bird-, swine- and human-flu viruses and provide a hospitable environment for the viruses to swap genes and create entirely new strains in a process called reassortment. That is what may have happened with...
Birds are the natural reservoirs of the common flu strains that strike in winter - and those strains reassort themselves to hit humans particularly hard. But while humans are not susceptible to every strain of avian flu, pigs definitely are. When bird flu viruses replicate in pigs, they pick up the viral machinery that gives more selective flu strains the power to spread to other mammals, like us. That's what makes pigs such potent mixing bowls for flu. The roundabout bird-pig-human route may be less common than the straight bird-human jump, but it may be more problematic...
...conference, Córdova responded that there had been mixed signals from the flu epidemic in La Gloria and most who had taken ill had suffered from a familiar form of the influenza virus. He also said the government had no model of the H1N1 virus - which has features of avian, pig and human viruses - to base their studies on. "We never had this kind of epidemic in the world," he said on Monday. "This is the first time we have this kind of virus." As if to underline the point, the conference and Mexico City were rocked by tremors from...