Swine Flu Virus: Ferret Study Suggests New Virus May Have Pandemic Potential
A new study says flu viruses of swine origin that caused a dozen infections in the United States in the second half of last year appear to have pandemic potential.
And the work, by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, seems to suggest that the fact the viruses haven’t taken off in people may have more to do with human immunity than the viruses themselves.
The findings are based on a transmission study in ferrets, work which is somewhat similar to the studies that sparked the ongoing controversy over lab-made H5N1 viruses.
For several months now, Dutch and American researchers have been attempting to publish scientific papers showing how they developed H5N1 — bird flu — viruses that transmitted easily among ferrets, considered the best animal for predicting how a flu virus might behave in people.
At a World Health Organization meeting last week, a group of experts — many of whom were drawn from the world of influenza research — agreed that the studies should be published in full, despite a U.S. government request that key portions of data be kept out of the public domain.
The new study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involves work with an H3N2 swine virus — now called an H3N2 variant — that has caused sporadic human cases in the United States, including some limited person-to-person spread.
The controversy over the H5N1 work relates to the fact that the research teams pushed the dangerous viruses to evolve to the point where they spread readily among ferrets, which might make the lab-made viruses transmissible among people. Currently H5N1 viruses rarely infect people, although when they do the infections are often fatal.