Tracking the avian flu
Interesting
article at Wired about the attempt to follow the avian flu through its mutations:
Predicting Bird Flu's Future
Avian flu could be morphing into forms going unobserved by most researchers, if one scientist's theory is correct.
On one hand, it would be bad news to discover that scientists don't have much of a handle on the flu's mutation activities. But it could also be good news: If Henry Niman's theory is correct, it would mean that scientists can predict avian flu's future iterations. And that would be handy for engineering vaccines that will work a year or two after they're manufactured.
Niman has founded a biotech company called Recombinomics based on his theory that avian flu genes are swapping pieces in a predictable way. This gene reorganization is called recombination, something that scientists agree happens during certain biological events, but not in the flu virus. They believe instead that viruses swap whole genes only, a process called re-assortment.
Fascinating stuff -- being able to track the virus as it goes through its changes. As for prediction, the CDC has some words:
Almost any other flu scientist, however, will say while it's possible to track virus history, there's no reliable way to predict its future mutations.
"There is no way to predict mutations," said Dave Daigle, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is one of the World Health Organization surveillance centers that tracks circulating strains of flu.
Posted by DaveH at March 3, 2005 4:27 PM