Researchers warn: New ‘bird flu’ strains close to becoming pandemics

[xchrom]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/08/researchers-warn-new-bird-flu-strains-close-to-becoming-pandemics/



Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found there isn’t much stopping the latest strains of the H5N1 and H7N9 flu viruses — also known as the “bird flu” — from being communicable from person to person.

MIT News reported on Thursday that new studies showed the viruses could become “pandemic flus” within just a few mutations — all it would take would be a change in one or two amino-acids.

“There are multiple different ways that this can happen,” lead author Ram Sasisekharan told the publication. Sasisekharan’s studies were published in the journal Cell on Thursday.

At least 132 people around the world have been infected by the H7N9 virus in 2013, most of them in China. Doctors in Shanghai reported that at least three patients encountered a strain that showed resistance to treatment via medication.

[TM99]

1. Anyone who has followed this research for the last decade

should not be surprised by these findings.

It has never been a matter of 'if' there will be another massive pandemic like the Spanish Flu but rather 'when' it will occur and what strains it will be.

[Buzz Clik]

2. And that "when" is just about every year.

[TalkingDog]

3. Or just in time for a new batch of innoculations to be produced and sent to market.

n/t

[NaturalHigh]

4. Kind of what I was thinking.

I don't mean to say that this isn't serious, but just a few years ago we were hearing about how H1N1 was going to be the next big epidemic.

[TM99]

5. I am not going to educated the masses

yet again, so please at least look up H1N1's actual pandemic status on Wikipedia and read up.

It was a major pandemic.

[TM99]

6. No, that when is

when the next large scale and large population death pandemic occurs like the Hong Kong Flu or the Spanish Flu.

Trying to compare the number of yearly deaths due to 'regular' flu outbreaks to such pandemics as those above is specious.

Your insipid cynicism and snark is duly noted.

[Buzz Clik]

7. Every year we are warned that "this year we have a possibility of a pandemic"

Every three years or so, we are told to make plans for not going to work, keeping kids home from school, disruption of daily lives. It's been going on for 15 years.

Are you going to deny that?

[TM99]

8. Yes, we have been warned by the CDC

and other health professionals who study this because we are 'overdue' for another pandemic like the ones mentioned. They are hardly predictable but they are statistically probable.

I don't give a rat's ass about the media. I do care about what I read form the NIH, CDC, and journals of epidemiology.

Between the hype and the denial, is a reality closer to the truth.

[SheilaT]

9. These warnings are issued pretty much every single year.

Notice the speculation buried in the article.

Every time I hear the fear-mongering about another 1918-type outbreak, I want to scream in frustration. We live in a totally different way from people one hundred years ago. The most basic thing is that almost every single person in this country has access to running water that's pretty clean, and regular hand-washing is generally practiced. A hundred years ago hardly anyone had hot and cold running water, and hand-washing was spotty at best. That's the single greatest improvement in public health.

Among the reasons the Bubonic Plague was so terrible was that Europeans generally lived right with their farm animals, and rarely washed from one year to the next.

The reason flu develops as it does in the far east is that humans there tend to live directly with their farm animals. Gosh, imagine that. If we could only change that part of their lives, flu mutations would slow down drastically and stop being such a menace to all of us.