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.