Flags and Lollipops

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Avian Flu

A member of my family works in foreign aid, organising disaster relief programs and similar projects. Recently she was talking about avian flu and how the plans that are currently being drawn up by European governments assume that bird flu will definitely cross over to humans - sooner rather than later. There have been headlines in the last week about outbreaks in birds as far west as the Urals and as far south as the Phillipines.

Yesterday, while checking out Connotea - Nature's new "Del.icio.us for references" software - I noticed that the top three tags there are "avian flu" "H5N1" (one of the strains of flu people are currently worried about - the H and N numbers refer to the types of protein on the surface of the flu virus) and "pandemic". Great. Assuming Connotea is used mostly by those in the know - well, people working in science, anyway - presumably this means that we should all be worried.

How difficult is it to apply modern genetic science to a particular strain of flu and work out how to disable it? Have matters improved since, say, SARS?

It seems that in this case, the problem isn't really with sequencing the virus strain and developing a vaccine but with more prosaic issues like manufacturing the vast number of vaccines required while still being able to control the seasonal variations of flu that cause an estimated quarter of a million deaths worldwide each year.

A good general introduction to the biology of avian flu can be found at 2can, the EBI's bioinformatics educational resource. Snowdeal has some good links and clippings on avian flu and how bioinformatics and geographic information systems (GIS) are being used in conjunction with one another to help epidemiologists track outbreaks and strains, too.

tags: posted by Stew @ 3:31 PM

Comments and trackbacks Feel free to post your comments Anonymous Lei Anonymous Anonymous Anonymous avian Anonymous Flu Masks . This post has trackbacks.

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4 Comments:

At August 18, 2005 5:10 PM, Anonymous Lei said...

I currently live in Vietnam aka bird flu central and was keeping a very close eye on developments early on. It stressed me out.

Since then, I've sort of grown numb. The situation is too uncertain for the average citizen to know what to do. Even though some people are screaming that not enough is being done, I think many people have more pressing issues like how to make the next mortgage payment or how to get their kids to do their homework.

I have my fingers crossed that it will turn out to be just a slightly more severe flu season.

Now I'm going to go stick my head in the sand again.

 
At August 19, 2005 7:06 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Another source is Flu Wiki, a non-partisan not-for-profit site for sharing information and links.

Making vaccine is a huge issue. it requires 4 times the 'usual' dose for the currently being testing H5N1 vaccine to work, and CDC plans call for enough to vaccinate the medical community and not much else.

That's assuming the virus doesn't mutate away from the vaccine's chosen antigens. The manufacturer will start in September, after the seasonal flu vaccine is produced. Then it takes another 6 months.

Perhaps the pandemic will hold off until then. Perhaps not. And the plans for the rest of the world?

 
At March 02, 2009 9:40 AM, Anonymous avian said...

Though highly species-specific, avian flu viruses are sometimes “passed” from birds to human through direct contact with infected bird or through contact with surfaces contaminated by feces from infected birds. This jump of virus from birds to human is a rare occurrence. There are but more than 100 human avian flu cases since its first breakout in 1997, and human-to-human transmission has only occurred twice in 11 years. This doesn’t mean you should be lax when it comes to protecting your health. Avian flu viruses are known to mutate, and there’s no way of predicting when they would mutate into a stronger virus strain that can infect humans more easily.

 
At August 24, 2009 7:18 PM, Anonymous Flu Masks said...

I wonder if they (European govts) assumed that the bird flu would combine with any other strains and turn into something like Swine Flu.

 

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Flags and Lollipops is a blog about bioinformatics, genomics and science on the web. I work at Nature in the web publishing department, but the views and opinions expressed here are personal and do not represent those of Nature Publishing Group.

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