The Influenza Threat Quotes

“For instance, one reason that the Ebola virus doesn’t spread widely among humans is that it is too efficient—mortality is as high as 90 percent—which”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“In the U.S., livestock farms often bar health officials from testing their pigs even though precursors of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic are thought to have kicked around U.S. pig farms for years before emerging in Mexico.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“mild cases of H5N1 have gone underreported or do not register in tests, which has artificially driven up the mortality rate. Others argue that deaths from H5N1 have gone underreported, which may make the mortality rate appear lower than it actually is.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“feces. If a wild bird infects a chicken on a poultry farm, the virus may get opportunities to interact with a range of additional viruses through close contact with pigs and other animals. This is indeed what has happened in the live animal markets and backyard farms of China and southern Asia. Influenza viruses are notorious for their ability to change, through a combination of mutation and “reassortment”—a borrowing of genes from other viruses. An open farm acts like a virus convention, where different strains swap genetic material like conventioneers swap business cards.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Webster’s hunch about birds being a reservoir for precursors to human viruses is now conventional wisdom.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“The researchers, under the direction of Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, crossed an H5N1 virus with the H1N1 pandemic virus of 2009, which spread like wildfire from one end of the world to another. The 2009 pandemic, you’ll recall, caught public health officials by surprise but luckily turned out to be mild. Kawaoka’s lab-made hybrid virus spreads among ferrets by airborne droplets expelled during the course of respiration–just as human influenza viruses such as the 2009 pandemic strain spread from person to person. Kawaoka’s concoction does not kill ferrets, and probably wouldn’t kill humans, but the feat is troubling because it demonstrates that an H5N1 virus that can spread among humans is most likely possible. (We don’t know for sure because it was tested only on ferrets, not humans, of course.)”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Indeed, two researchers have charged into the already fraught H5N1 publication controversy insisting the numbers are wrong, that the true mortality rate is likely to be much, much lower and that bad policy is being driven by the inflated figures.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Although the 2009 pandemic of influenza A H1N1 ended up being relatively mild— killing about one in 10,000 people who came down with it—it still claimed more than 14,000 lives across the globe. The relatively low mortality rate was a relief to forecasters because the outbreak's origin in Mexico and type had taken many by surprise.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Systematic sampling and mandatory reporting of disease in swine herds are limited to a handful of commercially devastating illnesses, including classical swine fever and nipah virus.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“So your solution is a universal vaccine. You need a vaccine that is not invalidated by drift and shift.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Various pathogens that can cause life-threatening infections such as HIV, hepatitis C virus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Plasmodium parasites (the source of malaria) can evade antibodies, and an effective vaccine against these pathogens would need to stimulate robust T cell responses.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Many natural infections have at least one benefit in that a bout of illness confers lifelong immunity against the causative pathogen. An ideal vaccine would also offer such lasting protection, preferably with a single dose, and perhaps even protect against related threats, such as all members of the ever evolving family of human flu viruses.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“When antigenic shift occurs, strains crop up bearing a totally new hemagglutinin spike, and sometimes also a new neuraminidase molecule, that most people have never encountered. As a result the virus may evade the antibody repertoire carried by all populations around the globe and trigger a pandemic. In today’s jet-linked world, people can spread a dangerous new virus from one part of the earth to another in a day. Such a drastic metamorphosis cannot occur through simple genetic mutation. The best-studied process leading to antigenic shift involves the mixing of two viral strains in one host cell, so that the genes packaged in new viral particles (and their corresponding proteins) come partly from one strain and partly from the other. This reassortment can take place because the genome, or genetic complement, of the influenza virus consists of eight discrete strands of RNA (each of which codes for one or two proteins). These strands are easily mixed and matched when new influenza A particles form in a dually infected cell. For instance, some influenza viruses infect both people and pigs. If a pig were somehow invaded by a human virus and by a strain that typically infected only birds, the pig might end up producing a hybrid strain that was like the human virus in every way except for displaying, say, a hemagglutinin molecule from the bird virus.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“When the hemagglutinin or neuraminidase genes and proteins accumulate several alterations, they can become virtually unrecognizable to most of the antibodies in a population and may initiate a new epidemic.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“These alterations arise through small mutations in the gene that constitutes the blueprint for that protein. Sometimes a mutation makes little difference in the protein’s stability or activity. Sometimes it damages the protein and reduces the viability of the virus. Other times, though, it enhances survival, such as by reconfiguring a site on hemagglutinin that was formerly recognized by an antibody.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“The neuraminidase molecules on the freshly made particles can cleave sialic acid. In other words, the neuraminidase spikes essentially dissolve the unwanted sialic acid “glue,” thereby enabling the viral particles to travel. The enzyme also helps the virus to plow through the mucus between cells in the airways.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Type A influenzas, in contrast, affect pigs, horses, seals, whales and birds as well as humans, although not all strains infect all species. (Indeed, only four subtypes have been found in humans.) They are also responsible for all of this century’s pandemics.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Scientists isolated an influenza strain from a human for the first time in 1933. Since then, they have learned that influenza viruses come in two main “flavors”— types A and B—that differ in certain of their internal proteins. A third type (C) does not seem to cause serious disease.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Influenza strains that colonize humans have a particular affinity for the epithelial cells that form the lining of the respiratory tract. Successful infection typically leads after a day or two to such classic symptoms as runny or stuffy nose, dry cough, chills, fever, aches, deep tiredness and loss of appetite. Historical descriptions based on symptoms indicate that flu epidemics have probably plagued human populations since well before the 5th century B.C.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“the 2009 H1N1 virus so alarming is that its recent forebears infected three species—humans, birds and pigs.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Swine influenza is not even a reportable disease, a classification saved for diseases deemed a threat to the entire industry, such as foot-and-mouth disease. On the other hand, pig flu viruses can be a big problem for the general population. That is because pigs are a genetic crucible for new flu viruses. They can be infected with flu viruses from birds, other pigs and people, creating opportunities for a melding of genes in new combinations known as reassortants. The fear is these new hybrids will prove capable of infecting people readily, while being sufficiently foreign to cause serious illness once they do.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“You could call pigs the Achilles’ heel of global influenza surveillance.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Intensive monitoring of pig viruses is unlikely to come any time soon, however. Most pork-producing countries do not test their pigs at all, and in some that do—such as the U.S.—the testing is done on behalf of the pork producers, who have little economic incentive to share what they find.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Someday there may be a vaccine that can fend off all subtypes of influenza, but such a vaccine remains a dream for now.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Flu viruses mutate constantly.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“For the viruses to be transmitted efficiently, they have to multiply in the upper portion of the respiratory system so that they can be transmitted by coughing and sneezing.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Although regular human flu viruses bound easily with the receptors found in the nose and throat cells, H5N1 strains attached only to those receptors on cells found in the deepest regions of the lungs.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“this bird flu currently lacks the protein key to unlock certain cells in the human upper respiratory tract, preventing it from spreading via a sneeze or a cough.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“A virus's ability to spread is the key to its ability to create a pandemic.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making

“Because influenza viruses continually evolve, new influenza strains continually threaten human populations.”
― Scientific American, The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making