| Title | Just Three Genetic Changes Are Needed to Turn H7N9 Bird Flu Into a Human Pandemic | |
| Date | Saturday June 17 2017, @06:10PM | |
| Author | mrpg | |
| Topic | ||
| from the humans-beware dept. | ||
Scientists have found that three mutations are needed to make the H7N9 strain of bird flu more virulent in humans:
A study published Thursday shows how a bird flu virus that's sickening and killing people in China could mutate to potentially become more contagious. Just three changes could be enough to do the trick, scientists report [open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1006390] [DX] in the journal PLOS Pathogens. And the news comes just as federal officials are getting ready to lift a moratorium on controversial lab experiments that would deliberately create flu viruses with mutations like these.
Public health officials have been worried about this bird flu virus, called H7N9, because it's known to have infected more than 1,500 people — and killed 40 percent of them. So far, unlike other strains that more commonly infect humans, this deadly virus does not spread easily between people.
[...] It turns out that three small mutations made the fragment bind far more strongly to receptors found on human cells than to receptors from bird cells. Scientists know, from studying strains that led to past pandemics, that this kind of switch appears to be involved in enabling a bird flu virus to become transmissible between people. "All we've done is to look at one of the properties that we're pretty certain is important," says Paulson, who cautions that additional genetic mutations might be necessary for this virus to become more contagious in humans. "So, just because we've changed the one property doesn't mean that that property alone is sufficient to let the virus transmit."
Thank you very much, I'll be in my lab.
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