Archive for the ‘bird flu’ tag
Scientist Create, Accidentally Release Killer Flu Virus
Public health authorities concerned about what has been described as a “serious error” on the part of Baxter International, a Canadian company that manufactures flu virus for use in making flu vaccines.
Serious error? The company evidently did on purpose what epidemiologists have been fearing might happen naturally and combined live H5N1 avian flu virus with a human flu virus.
The contaminated product, which Baxter calls “experimental virus material,” was made at the Orth-Donau research facility. Baxter makes its flu vaccine - including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly - at a facility in the Czech Republic.
People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled in the Orth-Donau facility.
While H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people.
That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created.
Like the 1918 flu pandemic that killed fifty million people world wide. In 1918, the world’s population had not yet reached two billion.
In 2012, it is expected to hit the seven billion mark.
See: The Canadian Press: Baxter admits contaminated seasonal flu product contained live bird flu virus.
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