Swine Flu: The predictable pandemic?
Shaoni Bhattacharya, news editor
We’ve known that swine flu could cause a human pandemic for more than a decade – but no one paid attention. Variants of the same virus have been endemic in North American hog farms since 1998 and have been evolving rapidly. Our special report explores where the virus came from, whether the world can cope, and what treatments might be effective…MORE
Scientists have warned about swine flu for last decade
We’ve known that swine flu could cause a human pandemic for more than a decade – but no one paid attention
Swine flu: The predictable pandemic?
29 April 2009
by Debora MacKenzie
Magazine issue 2706.
THE swine flu virus has been a serious pandemic threat for years, New Scientist can reveal – but research into its potential has been neglected compared with other kinds of flu.
As New Scientist went to press, cases were being reported far from the original outbreak in Mexico. The clusters of milder infections in the US suggest the virus is spreading readily among people. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says this strain is so different from existing human flu viruses that most people have no immunity to it. There are no existing vaccines.
All this means the virus could go pandemic. Or it might not: if the virus spreads less readily than is feared, it might not be able to maintain itself in the human population and could fizzle out (see “What makes flu go global?”).
We could have seen this coming, though. This type of virus emerged in the US in 1998 and has since become endemic on hog farms across North America. Equipped with a suite of pig, bird and human genes, it was also evolving rapidly.
Flu infects many animals, including waterfowl, pigs and humans. Birds and people rarely catch flu viruses adapted to another host, but they can pass flu to pigs, which also have their own strains.If a pig catches two kinds of flu at once it can act as a mixing vessel, and hybrids can emerge with genes from both viruses.
This is what happened in the US in 1998. Until then, American pigs had regular winter flu, much like people, caused by a mutated virus from the great human pandemic of 1918, which killed pigs as well as at least 50 million people worldwide. This virus was a member of the H1N1 family – with H and N being the virus’s surface proteins haemagglutinin and neuraminidase.
Over decades, H1N1 evolved in pigs into a mild, purely swine flu, and became genetically fairly stable. In 1976, there was an outbreak of swine H1N1 in people at a military camp in New Jersey, with one death. The virus did not spread efficiently, though, and soon fizzled out.
But in 1998, says Richard Webby of St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, swine H1N1 hybridised with human and bird viruses, resulting in “triple reassortants” that surfaced in Minnesota, Iowa and Texas. The viruses initially had human surface proteins and swine internal proteins, with the exception of three genes that make RNA polymerase, the crucial enzyme the virus uses to replicate in its host. Two were from bird flu and one from human flu. Researchers believe that the bird polymerase allows the virus to replicate faster than those with the human or swine versions, making it more virulent.
By 1999, these viruses comprised the dominant flu strain in North American pigs and, unlike the swine virus they replaced, they were actively evolving. There are many versions with different pig or human surface proteins, including one, like the Mexican flu spreading now, with H1 and N1 from the original swine virus.
All these viruses still contained the same “cassette” of internal genes, including the avian and human polymerase genes, reports Amy Vincent of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Ames, Iowa (Advances in Virus Research, vol 72, p 127). “They are why the swine versions of this virus easily outcompete those that don’t have them,” says Webby.
But the viruses have been actively switching surface proteins to evade the pigs’ immunity. There are now so many kinds of pig flu that it is no longer seasonal. One in five US pig producers actually makes their own vaccines, says Vincent, as the vaccine industry cannot keep up with the changes.
This rapid evolution posed the “potential for pandemic influenza emergence in North America”, Vincent said last year. Webby, too, warned in 2004 that pigs in the US are “an increasingly important reservoir of viruses with human pandemic potential”. One in five US pig workers has been found to have antibodies to swine flu, showing they have been infected, but most people have no immunity to these viruses.
The virus’s rapid evolution created the potential for a pandemic to emerge in North America
Our immune response to flu, which makes the difference between mild and potentially lethal disease, is mainly to the H surface protein. The Mexican virus carries the swine version, so the antibodies we carry to human H1N1 viruses will not recognise it.
That’s why the CDC warned last year that swine H1N1 would “represent a pandemic threat” if it started circulating in humans.
The avian polymerase genes are especially worrying, as similar genes are what make H5N1 bird flu lethal in mammals and what made the 1918 human pandemic virus so lethal in people. “We can’t yet tell what impact they will have on pathogenicity in humans,” says Webby.
It appears the threat has now resulted in the Mexican flu. “The triple reassortant in pigs seems to be the precursor,” Robert Webster, also at St Jude’s, told New Scientist.
While researchers focused on livestock problems could see the threat developing, it is not one that medical researchers focused on human flu viruses seemed to have been aware of. “It was confusing when we looked up the gene sequences in the database,” says Wendy Barclay of Imperial College London, who has been studying swine flu from the recent US cases. “The polymerase gene sequences are bird and human, yet they were reported in viruses from pigs.”
So where did the Mexican virus originate? The Veratect Corporation based in Kirkland, Washington, monitors world press and government reports to provide early disease warnings for clients, including the CDC. Their first inkling of the disease was a 2 April report of a surge in respiratory disease in a town called La Gloria, east of Mexico City, which resulted in the deaths of three young children. Only on 16 April – after Easter week, when millions of Mexicans travel to visit relatives – reports surfaced elsewhere in the country.
Local reports in La Gloria blamed pig farms in nearby Perote owned by Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of US hog giant Smithfield Foods. The farms produce nearly a million pigs a year.
Smithfield Foods, in a statement, insists there are “no clinical signs or symptoms” of swine flu in its pigs or workers in Mexico. That is unsurprising, as the company says it “routinely administers influenza virus vaccination to swine herds and conducts monthly tests for the presence of swine influenza.” The company would not tell New Scientist any more about recent tests. USDA researchers say that while vaccination keeps pigs from getting sick, it does not block infection or shedding of the virus.
All the evidence suggests that swine flu was a disaster waiting to happen. But it got little research attention, perhaps because it caused mild infections in people which didn’t spread. Now one swine flu virus has stopped being so well-behaved.
What makes flu go global?
A “pandemic” is an epidemic that goes global, so technically there is a flu pandemic every year. But the term is usually reserved for bad outbreaks that follow large changes in the virus.
The influenza virus constantly evolves, and pandemics happen every few decades when the flu virus gets new surface proteins that people have little immunity to, generally because they come from an animal strain. The lack of immunity means the virus affects more people more severely.
That’s why H5N1 bird flu is so dangerous. Its H5 surface protein is totally new to humans, and the virus has killed more than half of the people it infected. It or another bird flu that can infect humans, such as a virus from the H7 or H9 families, only needs to become readily contagious to go pandemic.
H1N1 has received less attention partly because an H1N1 strain already circulates in humans. The problem is the Mexican strain carries different versions of H1. Still, that alone is not enough to make this virus pandemic.
It must also transmit efficiently in people. Every victim must infect more than one other person for the virus to spread. The new strain could do this, as it is packing an altogether faster engine than previous H1N1 strains. It has an avian gene that has powered it to dominance in pigs, though no one knows for certain if this will make it dangerous in people.
Complete article at:
http://tinyurl.com/dxuum8 (www.newscientist.com)
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Swine Flu: Budgets and Immigration Status
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
DAVID KATZ, DavidK@communicarehc.org,
http://www.communicarehc.org
Katz is a family physician at CommuniCare Health Centers in Yolo County, California. He said today: “We have had decreased capacity in our clinics in dealing with something like swine flu because we’ve had county and state cutbacks over the last year. …
“CommuniCare is a network of community health centers that cares for the underserved population of the county. I’m concerned about budgetary decisions being made in many counties in California that exclude undocumented county residents from the county-financed safety net health systems. County supervisors in Yolo County will hold a public hearing on May 5 in Woodland, California to solicit legally required citizen input on their proposed exclusion of Yolo County residents from the County YCHIP program on the basis of immigration status.
“When you have such initiatives, as we do in our county, you start shifting health care costs to hospital emergency rooms and hospitals. It is quite possible that these costs will overwhelm our community hospitals, resulting in one or more going out of business.
“I am concerned that separating out one segment of the California population from access to our health care system damages everyone. It’s obviously bad for the undocumented who have to worry about paying inordinate amounts of money or not going in for care altogether. But it affects everyone else too. If undocumented parents don’t get prompt treatment for infectious illnesses, they could pass along infections such as swine flu, TB or whooping cough to other county residents. In short, where health care is for the few, we find more health problems for all in the community.”
From: Institute for Public Accuracy
Swine Flu Commercial, 1976
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/04/swine-flu-commercial-1976/
From: Ritholtz Blog
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Cybercrooks exploit swine flu hysteria
Asher Moses
April 30, 2009
Cybercriminals are exploiting the worldwide hysteria over swine flu to peddle fake drugs and steal credit card details, security experts warn.
“The scare has spawned a spamming frenzy, like sharks smelling blood in the water,” Symantec’s Mayur Kulkarni wrote in a blog post.
Security firm F-Secure has compiled a list of 146 swine flu-related internet sites that have been registered over the last few days by scammers looking to collect “donations” and peddle malware, fake pills and bogus swine flu survival guides.
McAfee said domain name registrations mentioning the word “swine” were up by about 30 times. One of the new sites, noswineflu.com, offers a dodgy “Swine Flu Prevention Guide” for $US19.95.
McAfee and Symantec also revealed a surge in spam campaigns riding on the back of the flu threat, which instead of delivering useful information distribute viruses and offer bogus pills that purportedly eradicate the flu.
When victims go to buy any products offered by the spammers, their credit card details are harvested.
Victims may also be sent bogus drugs purporting to be generic versions of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, which could pose health risks, Sophos warned. The same fake pharmaceuticals were being peddled by scammers during the bird flu scare.
Subject lines from the spam emails include “Madonna caught swine flu!” and “Swine flu in Hollywood!”. The messages contain links either to online pharmacy sites selling counterfeit drugs or malicious sites that infect target computers with password-stealing viruses.
Cisco IronPort estimated that swine flu-related messages already account for up to 4 per cent of the world’s spam.
The US Government-run Computer Emergency Readiness Team, US-CERT, acknowledged the email scams and warned people not to open any malicious links or attachments.
“If users click on this link or open the attachment, they may be directed to a phishing website or exposed to malicious code,” US-CERT warned, adding that all official information can be found on the website of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The World Health Organisation today raised its flu alert signalling a swine flu pandemic is “imminent” after a toddler in the United States became the first to die of the disease outside of Mexico.
…
Complete article at:
http://tinyurl.com/cod8dy (www.theage.com.au)
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Money & Co. Blog: Why academia failed to see the financial crash coming
Los Angeles Times Online
http://tinyurl.com/cjqcsq (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
Tom Petruno
April 28, 2009
Soul searching over who’s to blame for the financial-system meltdown, UC BERKELEY ECONOMICS PROFESSOR BARRY EICHENGREEN takes aim at his own profession.
In a highly readable piece on nationalinterest.org , Eichengreen writes:
The Great Credit Crisis has cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics. . . . The question is how we could have been so misguided.
One interpretation, understandably popular given our current plight, is that the basic economic theory informing the actions of central bankers and regulators was fatally flawed.
But another view, considerably closer to the truth, is that the problem lay not so much with the poverty of the underlying theory as with selective reading of it . . . [which] encouraged financial decision makers to cherry-pick the theories that supported excessive risk-taking….
I urge reading his entire piece. It’s far more interesting (and honest) than any explanation Alan Greenspan has yet offered for what went wrong.
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Op-Ed: The Price of Inaction
Business World Online [Manila, Philippines]
http://www.bworldonline.com/BW043009/content.php?id=141
By J. Bradford Delong
J. BRADFORD DELONG, a former assistant US Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, is PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY.
April 30, 2009
Berkeley — Are the world’s governments capable of keeping the world economy out of a deep and long depression? Three months ago, I would have said yes, without question. Now, I am not so certain. The problem is not that governments are unsure about what to do. The standard checklist of what to do in a financial crisis to avoid a deep and prolonged depression has been gradually worked out over two centuries: by Bank of England Governor Cornelius Buller in 1825; by the Victorian-era editor of The Economist, Walter Bagehot; and by the economists Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, among many others.
The key problem in times like these is that investor demand for safe, secure, and liquid assets — and thus their value — is too high, while demand for assets that underpin and finance the economy’s productive capital is too low. The obvious solution is for governments to create more cash to satisfy the demand for safe, secure, liquid assets….
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Freakonomics Blog: Animal Spirits
A Q&A With George Akerlof
New York Times Online
http://tinyurl.com/c75qc9 (freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com)
By Dwyer Gunn
April 30, 2009
It’s safe to say that macroeconomists haven’t been very popular lately. In fact, many people blame the profession for such sins as failing to predict the housing bubble and encouraging the deregulation of the financial industry.
In their new book Animal Spirits, the economists GEORGE AKERLOF and Robert Shiller propose a new macroeconomic framework — one that incorporates real human behavior, with all its quirks and irrationalities. The book explores the intersection of economics and psychology and offers valuable insights into a variety of important economic policy issues.
GEORGE AKERLOF, WHO TEACHES ECONOMICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on asymmetrical information markets. He has agreed to answer a few of our questions about the new book….
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BEA News: Personal Income and Outlays, March 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has issued the following news release today:
Personal income decreased $34.4 billion, or 0.3 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) decreased $1.8 billion, or less than 0.1 percent, in March, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) decreased $24.2 billion, or 0.2 percent.
The full text of the release on BEA’s Web site can be found at
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/pi/pinewsrelease.htm .
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LIMBAUGH TO SPECTER: TAKE MCCAIN AND HIS DAUGHTER WITH YOU
By Sam Stein, Huffington Post
“For years, many in the conservative world have wished for an ideologically purer GOP. Their wish has been granted. Happy?”
http://tinyurl.com/cnbmap (www.alternet.org)
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And now for the important news ….
By Argus Hamilton
Mexico was forced to shut down schools Friday due to a new strain of Swine Flu which broke out just south of the U.S.-Mexico border. Biomedical researchers are busy working on the vaccine. All we know so far is that it doesn’t respond to cocaine.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
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three thousand words
|
Adam Zyglis
The Buffalo News Apr 30, 2009 |
Mike Luckovich: guys, this is gonna be easy. …
(alt.coxnewsweb.com)
Matt Davies: Drumroll…
(davies.lohudblogs.com)
