Gene Swap Helps Bird Flu Spread Between Mammals. (May 3, 2013)

The following is reprinted from the May 3, 2013 issue of Science. and with the the onset of Winter in the Southern hemisphere gives pause.

A simple gene swap can make the dangerous bird flu strain H5N1 transmissible between mammals, finds a paper published by Science this week.

H5N1 can infect humans in contact with infected birds, but does not spread efficiently between people. A team led by Chen Hualan at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in China wanted to know if that might change if H5N1 picks up genes from H1N1, a human flu strain, when the two infect the same host. They created 127 hybrids of the two viruses and tested which would spread from one guinea pig to another via respiratory droplets. H5N1 needed to borrow only one gene from H1N1, they found, to efficiently spread between the guinea pigs. A similar study published last month in PLOS ONE by Ron Fouchier's group at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, found that these gene swaps alone didn't make the virus airborne between ferrets, another animal model for flu.

Virologist Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute in Paris says the study is a "super piece of work" scientifically, but also calls it "very dangerous" because the virus could escape from the lab, and the paper could help wannabe bioterrorists. http://scim.ag/geneswap