Avian flu dangers increase as virus spreads
The New York Times reports: Pandemic risk rises as bird flu spreads:
As bird flu outbreaks have cropped up in Nigeria, Azerbaijan and Iraq over the past week – countries that are ill-prepared to battle the fast-moving virus – scientists have said that the new pattern of spreading infection makes a worldwide human pandemic more likely….
“These are horrendous developments, whether you’re a human or if you’re a bird,” said John Oxford, professor of virology at Queen Mary’s college at the University of London. “Everyone wondered what would happen if avian influenza came to Africa, but no one really prepared. They waited. Now it’s there – and this is not the most organized continent in the world.”
Making recent developments especially scary is Africa’s high HIV/AIDS rates, as HIV-infected people may form an ideal incubation location for Avian flu to mutate, increasing the odds of developing a strain with human-to-human transmission:
In the initial stages, having a depressed immune system could have a protective effect, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, because virulent flus set off a powerful immune reaction that can drown the lungs in fluid….
But HIV-infected people who managed to fight off bird flu would become ideal crucibles in which the H5N1 virus could exchange genes with other viruses, dramatically increasing the likelihood of a bird flu strain that could readily infect humans.
“If H5N1 gets into people with AIDS it would likely persist and throw off mutants left, right and center,”
You would think that given the risk, the world would be mobilizing to confront this threat. You would think…
1 comment February 12th, 2006