NewScientist (24 February 2018) reports on a new strain of avian flu:
A NEW strain of avian flu has infected people for the first time. So far, the virus doesn’t seem to be especially threatening, but its jump from chickens to humans was unexpected: the World Health Organization says no similar strains have ever crossed to people before.
Last week, the Hong Kong government announced that a 68-year-old woman in Jiangsu province in eastern China was hospitalised in January with severe respiratory symptoms. This turned out to be the first recorded case of an H7N4 flu virus infecting humans.
The woman recovered after a month in hospital. She had handled live poultry before falling ill, so probably caught the virus from the birds or the market she bought them in. No one around her developed any symptoms.
The case highlights the huge amount of unpredictable viral evolution taking place in livestock farming. “This reminds us that virus activity in animal reservoirs is very dynamic, and we should not just focus on one subtype,” says Wenqing Zhang of the World Health Organization.One such subtype – H7N9 – has infected more than 1500 people in China since it first emerged in the country in 2013. More than half of these cases occurred last winter and spring alone, and 40 per cent were fatal.
I – along with every virologist in the world – fear that one of these high fatality rate flus is going to get the genes that makes it highly contagious for humans. And how much effort is being put into better vaccines or TamiFlu II?
