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Gene Mutation Caused 2009 H1N1 Virus Spread
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found that a gene mutation was the reason behind the increased virulence of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu virus which resulted in a pandemic across the world. 'The H1N1 virus, Kawaoka explains, is really a combination of four different avian and swine flu viruses that have emerged over the past 90 years, and even includes genetic residue of the 1918 pandemic virus, an influenza that killed as many as 20 million people.' The University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Veterinary Medicine researchers identified the relocation of a specific amino acid in the gene matrix that enabled the virus to hijack host cells, a feat that triggered the recent pandemic."
The World Health Organization's director general said H1N1 is likely to lose its status as a pandemic very soon.
Hey, can I get a single nucleotide polymorphism that enables limb regeneration?
No, I get a weird catecholamine oxidizer that makes me more likely to kill people.
FTFY
Simply put, H1N1 was fine tuned by the government in a lab. The H1N1 was a completely engineered 'pandemic' from top to bottom, in order to get a brainless populace to take a vaccine that will damage their DNA.
As was Mad Cow, Hoof and Mouth, Y2K, Terrorists, Avian Flu, and a half dozen other incidents in the past couple decades.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
It WAS and IS unjustified media fear mongering. They had everyone expecting another Spanish flu at least or perhaps a great plague level event. They had people convinced that not getting vaccinated was as good as a death sentence. Governments were stockpiling massive quantities of flu remedies.
Nobody denied that the flu existed and that it was a mutation was a given. The particular mutation involved is interesting.
Note the distinct lack of mass graves, cities shut down or evacuated, auditoriums converted to medical wards, etc. etc. etc. Note how the "pandemic" went into decline even before the flu shots had a chance to become effective. Note how the overall mortality rate was a bit less than that of the typical seasonal flu.
In other words.....YAWN!
The linked summary article is so much technobabble. Slashdot is full of smart people who can handle a link to an open access journal article...
Go to http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1001034 to find out that the lack of a Lysine (K627) in the PB2 gene would normally prohibit this virus from replicating in humans, but is compensated for by the presence of a Arginine (R591) residue. These are both basic amino acids, and are located near each other on the structure. So, just a standard compensatory mutation - the sort of thing flu does all the time.
This is a nice bit of science, but it hardly explains the cause of the whole pandemic (this was a Franken-virus cobbled together from 4 other viruses). More science, less sensationalism, please!
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
I was thinking the same thing.
I didn't get either vaccine last year (that is, neither H1N1 nor the regular one), and I haven't caught either flu. Basic sanitary practices like washing my hands when I use the bathroom and refusing to share drinks seem to work in today's world.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
All that media hype *did* have an effect... more people were vaccinated, more people stayed home when sick, more schools were closed during local outbreaks, etc.
Yes, I agree it was over-hyped. Mostly because the media corps knew that it wold sell copy and sell ads.
But you'd be pretty damn hard-pressed to show that the hype didn't save lives and improve productivity.
Another note:
No. The figures reported in that report are minimum figures. The CDC reported 8533 deaths confirmed due to H1N1 in the US; if you check that number with the CDC, they state that the actual number is likely FAR higher.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Holy Cow! I work with Gene. I never thought he was capable of something like this.
Just goes to show you never really know someone.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
And if all the people in New Orleans had been bussed out before Katrina hit, it would have been a yawner, too. Then people would have complained that the expensive evacuation wasn't worth the money and that it was all just media hype.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Is that is WAS a pandemic but the word doesn't mean what most people think. Pandemic has the connotation of something that kills a lot, but it really just means a disease that spreads a lot. It literally means "an epidemic that is geographically widespread; occurring throughout a region or even throughout the world." So you can have a harmless pandemic (as this one largely was) just as you can have an extremely fatal disease that doesn't spread much. A pandemic itself isn't scary, it is a pandemic of a disease with a high kill rate that is.
So for the people who feel like it wasn't really a pandemic, that is simply a function of the media sensationalizing a word. The disease was a pandemic in its spread, but its kill rate was exceedingly low, even lower than normal flu strains, meaning that the net harm wasn't very much.
It's also possible that a number of people around you were vaccinated, which would have decreased your risk of exposure. Just a thought.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
No kidding! Far fewer people died of H1N1 than died of conventional yearly flu - by several orders of magnitude.
I was very surprised at how many people *do* die of conventional flu every year.
The difference between a virus and a parasite is that a virus attaches itself to a cell and alters the cell so that the cell produces more viruses. Parasites are living organisms in their own right and reproduce in various ways on their own. The difference has nothing to do with whether the disease kills.
In fact, viruses that kill rapidly don't stay around in the population for very long because dead people don't generally walk around and pass the disease to other people. Pathogenicity beyond a certain point is counterproductive. Thus, although most viruses would kill in the absence of an immune system. They also wouldn't spread very far, and the ones that survived would presumably be weakened strains that were not as virulent. Thus, in the long term, you'd probably end up with a similar case fatality rate as you have with viruses now.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I was thinking the same thing.
I didn't get either vaccine last year (that is, neither H1N1 nor the regular one), and I haven't caught either flu. Basic sanitary practices like washing my hands when I use the bathroom and refusing to share drinks seem to work in today's world.
Well I got both vaccines and I didn't catch either one, so they must've worked.
Thing is, I have as much proof I was exposed and protected by the vaccines as you have that you were exposed and protected by washing your hands. Which is to say, none. Preventative measures are invisible if they work and invisible if they're never tested, which makes anecdotes even less useful than normal.
But I gotta say... washing hands just after using the bathroom? Maybe if you work from home, but I'd at least add before meals or even snacking to that list. (Edges away from semi-public keyboard used for work.)
That tactic will not work for a large portion of the population. The existence of our school system means that airborne diseases will pass through large portions of the population. Particularly in winter months, you are taking virtually all of the minor population and packing them into tight quarters for long periods of time. That is without even factoring in the fact that school kids are unlikely to take the basic sanitary practices that you do. Sometimes they are not even allowed to.
So, your tactic might work for you, and if it does, I say keep it up, but unless you are prepared to take some drastic measures like shutting down the public school system, it won't work for most people. I don't get flue vaccines either. Mostly because at places I have worked, I have noticed a trend that the more people getting flue shots, the higher the rate of people with the flue. That and since I both telecommute and home school, it is really easy for me and my family to avoid people that are really sick.
Are you by any chance selling tiger-repellent rocks?
You are absolutely correct, insofar as anchors are generally made of metal instead of stone.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Nobody got "bussed out" though. The drugs sit on shelves (expiring rapidly).
It's as if a tropical storm formed on the Atlantic as usual and we evacuated the entire southeast right away, continuing the evacuation even after the spotter planes told us it had broken up and become a light rain shower. A year later and we still haven't officially admitted there is no hurricane.
Thanks to that, if a real killer flu happens that really could wipe out a third of the population, everyone will yawn and nobody will get an actually necessary vaccine.
search "The Times of India" for "swine flu"
You will find:
A: that there has been a 40% increase in swine flu cases recently.
B:that it requires 2 tests to confirm that a particular swab is swine flu rather than ordinary flu.
C: that the first test to establish that it is flu and not a common cold is cheap; but that the test to identify swine flu costs up to 5000 rupees (~$100)
D: that the second test is frequently not done and the results from the first test are assumed to be swine flu; which leads to a lot of false positives.
E: that some of the WHO experts had (have/) ties to pharma companies
The 2009 H1N1 must have mutated at a whole other level to be that resistant.
Must have? I find it surprising that so many people believe this was a random event when the first reported case of the
2009 N1H1 was about 80 miles from a research complex for Gilead Sciences (the company that developed Tamiflu) and one of
the researchers looking at 2009 N1H1 stated it was almost identical to a flu virus they'd been working on at the lab.
Production of 400 million capsules at around $12 each is a very big incentive to release a virus.
I think you're missing the big picture. The big picture is, flu vaccines take a long time to make. Yes, media fear mongers hyped up the worst case scenario, but the mass production was precisely because H1N1 was pandemic; ie, it wasn't as important if it had a high kill ratio as that it spread a lot and hence a lot of vaccines could counter the spread. As a result, a very large production of the vaccine were produced. The fact that "spotter planes told us it had broken up and become a light rain shower" is precisely why about half the vaccines weren't used. If you're looking for the media fear mongers to officially apologize, well good luck with that.
Meanwhile, the lethality of most influenza tends to be less from the flu being strong per se and more to do with people (elderly and children) having an immune system unable to cope. So, presumably the mass vaccination probably did save a good many elderly and child lives. And the pandemic status was accurate. The only thing really left is for the CDC and the WHO to officially admonish the various media fear mongers and apologize that they didn't do such earlier. I'm not really sure what you expecting though, unless you believe it's the CDC's and the WHO's job to have a PR arm to educate people that they shouldn't blindly believe everything the media might spit out, especially when it's the same jackasses spewing yet another thing to fear this week when last weeks fear didn't pan out as nearly as lethal as they made it out to be.
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