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CIDRAP News, which provides just about the best coverage of infectious disease issues on the Internet, has a report tonight about a research study that claims that the novel H1N1 virus behind today’s pandemic declaration jumped to humans months before it was noticed.
Possibly as early as August of 2008.
Contributing writer and book author Maryn McKenna brings us the details in her report, entitled:
Researchers say H1N1 virus jumped to humans months ago
Maryn McKenna
Contributing Writer
Jun 11, 2009 (CIDRAP News) – At almost the same moment today that the World Health Organization announced recognition of an influenza pandemic, researchers from Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and the United States declared that the novel H1N1 virus responsible has been circulating undetected in humans for months—and that its components have been present in pigs for at least a decade.
The group, led by Andrew Rambaut, PhD, of the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Evolutionary Biology, said in a letter to the journal Nature that their findings demonstrate the critical need to ramp up disease-detection efforts in animals: "Despite widespread influenza surveillance in humans, the lack of systematic swine surveillance allowed for the undetected persistence and evolution of this potentially pandemic strain for many years."
If better surveillance had existed, they suggest, the first flu pandemic in 41 years might have been detected much earlier—because the novel H1N1 strain's evolution tracks with the emergence of earlier and (as yet) more destructive pandemic strains.
"All three pandemics of the 20th century seem to have been generated by a series of multiple reassortment events in swine or humans, and to have emerged over a period of years before pandemic recognition," they write. "Our results show that the genesis of the [swine-origin influenza A H1N1 virus] epidemic followed a similar evolutionary pathway."
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