WHO gears up as new flu virus spreads

[Guest guest]

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1093067--who-gears-up-as-flu-virus-spr\

eads

WHO gears up as flu virus spreads

Published On Sat Nov 26 2011

The spread of an odd new flu virus that has been jumping from pigs to people in

parts of the United States has the World Health Organization gearing up its

response planning, a senior official of the agency says.

The United Nations health body is figuring out what needs to be done if the

virus continues to spread and a global response is required, said Dr. Keiji

Fukuda, assistant director-general for health security and environment.

The WHO wants to be ready to make recommendations and issue guidance to

countries if the need arises — though Fukuda stressed it is far from certain

there will be the need.

" We're very aware that we don't want to overplay or underplay. We're trying to

get that right, " Fukuda, a leading influenza expert, said from Geneva. " (We're)

trying to make sure that we're ready to move quickly, if we have to move

quickly, but also trying not to raise alarm bells. "

On Friday, The Canadian Press reported the Middlesex-London Health Unit received

its first laboratory-confirmed case of influenza A for the season. It wasn't

immediately clear if the case had any connections with the virus spreading in

the U.S.

The WHO's desire to be prepared without raising alarm is a legacy of the 2009

H1N1 pandemic. The WHO was heavily criticized for declaring a pandemic when the

outbreak turned out to be milder than feared.

But what exactly the agency — and the world — might need to prepare for now is

unclear. With the public relations problems of the 2009 outbreak fresh in the

minds of health officials, no one is using the " p " word these days.

Yet in some respects, the parallels are striking.

A new swine-origin flu virus is causing sporadic infections in parts of the

United States. Since it was first spotted in July, 10 cases have been confirmed

in Maine, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Iowa. All have been children under 10, with

an exception — a 58-year-old adult. Three of the cases required hospitalization.

It is an influenza A virus of the H3N2 subtype, a distant cousin of H3N2 viruses

that circulate in humans.

Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control say the gene looks like that

of H3N2 viruses that used to circulate in the early 1990s.

It is sufficiently different from contemporary human viruses that the H3N2

component of the seasonal flu shot is not expected to protect against this

virus, though it might boost antibody levels in those who were exposed to the

earlier H3N2 viruses.

The CDC is still doing serological work — checking stored blood samples for

antibodies that react to this virus — to figure out how much vulnerability there

is to the new virus. The current thinking is most people over the age of 21

would have had exposure to similar flu viruses and would therefore have some

protection against it.

Flu expert Malik Peiris, chair of the department of microbiology at the

University of Hong Kong, says exposure to contemporary H3N2 viruses might

provide some protection against these swine viruses.

" It is important to see the serological data to see how much vulnerability or

susceptibility there is in the human population, " Peiris says.

Dr. Arnold Monto, a flu expert at the University of Michigan, says if a major

part of the human population has antibodies that react to the virus, it may not

be much of a threat.

" If there's a lot of immunity in the population, there probably will not be any

kind of extensive spread except maybe in these little clusters where you have

little folks who don't have much immunity to anything, " he says.

Fukuda, on the other hand, says further spread cannot be ruled out: " There's no

reason why this virus, if it continues to spread human to human, couldn't move

from country to country among young people. "

The first seven infections appeared to have been instances where the virus

passed from pigs to people. But the most recent cases, in Iowa, seem to have

involved person-to-person spread.

There were three confirmed cases in that cluster, but it was likely larger. Two

contacts of the first confirmed case were also ill, but not tested. And the

people in this cluster said they had no contact with pigs.

[Guest guest]

And this after some Dutch scientists created from scratch a deadly new virus. They are actually debating wether to publish how they did it. One of these days someone IS going to create something horrible and turn it loose on the world.

In a message dated 11/27/2011 2:59:08 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, no_reply writes:

The spread of an odd new flu virus that has been jumping from pigs to people in parts of the United States has the World Health Organization gearing up its response planning, a senior official of the agency says.