Much Ado About Something
#194
If you’ve scanned the news headlines in the past 24 hours, it is likely you’ve seen a variation of the following article, which has flooded the Internet.
Article published Oct 31, 2006
New bird flu variant proving resistant to current vaccines
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON – Scientists have discovered a new strain of bird flu that appears to sidestep current vaccines.It’s infecting people as well as poultry in Asia, and some researchers fear its evolution may have been steered by the vaccination programs designed to protect poultry from earlier types of the H5N1 flu.
The discovery by Yi Guan of the University of Hong Kong and colleagues is reported in today’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The new variant has become the primary version of the bird flu in several provinces of China and has spread to Hong Kong, Laos, Malaysia and Thailand, the researchers report. It is being called H5N1 Fujian-like, to distinguish it from earlier Hong Kong and Vietnam variants.
“We don’t know what is driving this,” report co-author Dr. Robert G. Webster of St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., said in a telephone interview.
New vaccines will have to be developed, Webster said.
Many scientists are going to think the vaccination program encouraged the virus to evolve resistance, he added, but high-quality vaccines can reduce the level of illness and prevent emergence of variants.While the new virus has infected people, there is no evidence that it can pass easily from person to person, Webster said.
However, he added, “this virus is continuing to drift.”
Entire Article at:
http://tinyurl.com/yd7zkl
While the AP article above showed admirable restraint, other recountings of this story have run with far more alarmist headlines, including:
Latest Bird Flu Raises Alarm - News Journal, Delaware
Pandemic Fear Over New Bird Flu Strain - Aljazeera.net
First, before anyone panics, this didn’t happen today, or last week, or even last month. This has been going on for a year. It has made international headlines because a scientific paper was released today. The H5N1 Fujian-like strain has been a topic of discussion among scientists, and flubies for quite some time.
What we are learning today is that this new strain is rapidly taking over from the earlier strains, replacing the original clades with this new and improved version, and spreading out of China. This version appears to be resistant to the vaccines in use to control the infections in poultry, and may well prove to be resistant to the human vaccines developed to this point.
It also demonstrates that the H5N1 virus continues to mutate, and thrive.
This study is important. It tells us that H5N1 is a moving target, that making any vaccine is going to be very difficult, and that we must not let our guard down.
While the news on Avian Flu has been subdued for the past few weeks, it hasn’t gone away.
Yesterday, Egypt reported it’s 7th human fatality, and another suspected case, a 23-year-old woman, was admitted to the hospital. A local newspaper has reported as many as 5 suspected cases might now be hospitalized. The woman who died was admitted on Oct 4th, and we heard one brief report of it on the 12th of October. And then nothing until yesterday.
That should give you some idea how closely the authorities are holding avian flu information these days.
While the breathless reporting of this new study by some newspapers may be a bit over-the-top, perhaps it will renew their interest in covering the story. It might help awaken the sleeping masses that have simply forgotten about the potential for a pandemic.
And that would be a good thing.
