Posted on 11/16/2006 2:40:06 PM PST by blam
I'm not. my tinfoil hat will protect me.
I have to give a lot of credit to blam and LucyT for keeping up with developments--Far more often than not, I just ping the list when they find something.
May I suggest adding www.pandemicflu.gov to the list.
Unfortunately, so did Theodore Kaczynski.(...so much for the benefits of "higher education.")
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to you and yours!
I'm not saying everyone should forgo the 20th century -far from it - but circumstances were such in my life that I did undergo many hardships, and they were educational. At least people should try some primitive camping once in a while. Then they'd have some ideas of what they might be dealing with should some kind of disaster come rolling around...
The thing that struck me was that the PB2 E627K modification allows it to retain activity at a lower temperature. If you recall that is what is needed for it to be able to live higher up in our respiratory system. That means that we can sneeze/cough to spread it. Before it was way down in the warmer areas of the lungs and was harder to spread.
From my very limited knowledge of these things, there have been two differences between the H5N1 as expressed in fowl and as expressed in humans.
1) The binding site. Apparently H5N1 lodges in the intestines of fowl, as opposed to the lungs of humans. That is, the binding receptors on the coat of the virus have affinities for different cells in fowl and in humans.
2) The temperature at which the H5N1 likes to live and reproduce--it "likes" the warmer temperatures (say a chicken's gut) and it gets closer to that temperature only in the deep bronchial passages in humans. This means that mere ordinary sneezing and such is less likely to spread the virus outside a human host's body.
So if we have mutations which allow binding *and* breeding in the outermost regions of the human, that would allow greater spread in humans.
The question would then become, is the "cytokine storm" (heightened immune response) deadly in and of itself, or is it most deadly *because* the active sites for the virus are deep in the lungs, and so the immune response leads to drowning in your own fluids...?
Hint: What can the 1918 influenza tell us about this? Has anyone done X-ray crystallography on the proteins of each on e to compare the structures of the two influenza strains?
(...and yes, I *know* with mutation rates as they are, that that is a rather broad brush.)
Cheers!
...oh, and Merry Christmas.
I'm a layman's layman - so I just read up and absorb and understand whatever I can. I like this new forum, a lot of good minds there (better than mine, that's for sure):
https://www.singtomeohmuse.com/viewforum.php?f=1
PANDEMIC FLU INFORMATION FORUM
(Pinging a few of you to a new forum you might like. Easy to read, simple, non-combative.)
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas to you and yours, Oorang!
Niman's site has four new commentaries as of a couple of hours ago. More cases in Egypt, one death so far.
Bird flu claims Egyptian woman
An Egyptian woman has died of bird flu, hours after tests confirmed she and two other members of her extended family had been suffering from the virus.
The World Health Organisation's regional adviser for communicable diseases says the 30-year-old woman had been in hospital for a week, but doctors had not suspected bird flu as she denied having had contact with poultry.
A brother and a sister also have the virus.
The adviser says the family raised ducks in their home, and the brother and sister had slaughtered the flock after a number of ducks had become sick and died.
Seoul, Dec. 24 (ANI): South Korean quarantine workers slaughtered over a thousand pigs, dogs and cats, including 200,000 poultry in an area where the bird flu virus has been confirmed. The country is struggling to stem the spread of bird flu.
Nearly 4, 200 pigs were butchered at a farm in Asan, about 90 kilometers South of Seoul. A case of bird flu broke out last week in this area, and the deadly virus spread out when a case was reported at a chicken-farm in mid-November this year.
This is South Korea's fourth bird flu case in the last one month. One of the officials at the South Chungcheong provincial Governemnt said that there was an instruction by the Agricultural Ministry to cull all the pigs within 500 meters of the outbreak site.
Pigs can spread the disease, and medical experts believe that virus can mutate in the form that can create a pandemic among human beings. (ANI)
Iran also recently had a lot of chickens (IIRC) die, and then slaughtered more. Of course, they denied that it was avian flu...
Take care, friend!
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