New flu resembles feared 1918 virus: study

[Anti Federalist]

New flu resembles feared 1918 virus: study

Mon Jul 13, 2009 10:37am EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/healt...rpc=22&sp=true
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The new H1N1 influenza virus bears a disturbing resemblance to the virus strain that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, with a greater ability to infect the lungs than common seasonal flu viruses, researchers reported on Monday.

Tests in several animals confirmed other studies that have shown the new swine flu strain can spread beyond the upper respiratory tract to go deep into the lungs -- making it more likely to cause pneumonia, the international team said.

In addition, they found that people who survived the 1918 pandemic seem to have extra immune protection against the virus, again confirming the work of other researchers.

"When we conducted the experiments in ferrets and monkeys, the seasonal virus did not replicate in the lungs," said Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, who led the study.

The H1N1 virus replicates significantly better in the lungs."

The new swine flu virus has caused the first pandemic of the 21st century, infecting more than a million people, according to estimates, and killing at least 500. The World Health Organization says it is causing mostly moderate disease but Kawaoka said that does not mean it is like seasonal flu.

"There is a misunderstanding about this virus," he said in a statement. "There is clear evidence the virus is different than seasonal influenza."

Writing in the journal Nature, Kawaoka and colleagues noted that the ability to infect the lungs is a characteristic of other pandemic viruses, especially the 1918 virus, which is estimated to have killed between 40 million and 100 million people.

OLD PROTECTION

They tested the virus in blood samples taken from nursing home residents and workers in 1999 in California, Wisconsin, the Netherlands and Japan.

People born before 1920 had a strong antibody response to the new H1N1 virus, meaning their body "remembered" it from infection early in life. This finding supports a study published in Nature in August that also found people who survived the 1918 pandemic still had immune protection against that virus.

Flu viruses change constantly, which is why people can be re-infected and why the vaccine must be changed regularly. Current seasonal strains of H1N1 are distant cousins of both the 1918 pandemic strain and the new H1N1 strain.

"Our findings are a reminder that swine-origin influenza viruses have not yet garnered a place in history, but may still do so, as the pandemic caused by these viruses has the potential to produce a significant impact on human health and the global economy," the researchers wrote.

Other tests showed the virus could be controlled by the antiviral drugs Relenza, made by GlaxoSmithKline, and Tamiflu, made by Roche AG, the researchers said.

The World Health Organization said on Monday that vaccine makers should start making immunizations against H1N1 and that healthcare workers should be first in line to get them.

Companies working on an H1N1 vaccine include Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis AG, Baxter International Inc, GlaxoSmithKline, Solvay and nasal spray maker MedImmune, now part of AstraZeneca.

[Anti Federalist]

Dangerous experiments
10:33 21 October 2004
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.

The 1918 flu virus spread across the world in three months and killed at least 40 million people. If it escaped from a lab today, the death toll could be far higher.

“The potential implications of an infected lab worker – and spread beyond the lab – are terrifying,” says D. A. Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading biosecurity expert.

Yet despite the danger, researchers in the US are working with reconstructed versions of the virus at less than the maximum level of containment. Many other experts are worried about the risks. “All the virologists I have spoken to have concerns,” says Ingegerd Kallings of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control in Stockholm, who helped set laboratory safety standards for the World Health Organization.

Work on the 1918 flu virus is not the only worry. Some experiments with bird flu have also been criticised as dangerous (New Scientist print edition, 28 February 2004).

Kallings and others are calling for international discussions to resolve the issues related to such work. “It is time for influenza scientists to find a consensus on containment,” she says. John MacKenzie of the University of Queensland in Australia, who investigated how the SARS virus escaped from high-level containment labs in east Asia on three occasions after lab workers became infected, agrees. “A meeting would be beneficial.”

Gene sequencing
The researchers working on the 1918 virus say their work is vital to understand what changes make flu viruses dangerous. So far five of the 1918 flu virus’s eight genes have been sequenced, using fragments retrieved from victims of the pandemic.

Several teams have added one or more of these genes to modern flu viruses, or plan to – in effect partially recreating the long-vanished pandemic virus.

The latest work was done by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His team showed that adding the 1918 gene for the surface protein haemagglutinin to modern viruses made them far deadlier to mice.

The researchers also found that people born after 1918 have little or no immunity.

The team started the work at the highest level of containment, BSL-4, at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Then they decided the viruses were safe enough to handle at the next level down, and did the rest of the work across the border in a BSL-3Ag lab in Madison. The main difference between BSL-4 and BSL-3Ag is that precautions to ensure staff do not get infected are less stringent: while BSL-4 involves wearing fully enclosed body suits, those working at BSL-3Ag labs typically have half-suits.

Kawaoka told New Scientist that the decision to move down to BSL-3Ag was taken only after experiments at BSL-4 showed that giving mice the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) in advance prevented them getting sick. This means, he says, that if all lab workers take oseltamivir “they cannot become infected”.

Contradictory results
Yet this assumes that the mouse results apply to humans. And the findings have not been published. In similar experiments, Terrence Tumpey’s team at the US Department of Agriculture’s poultry research lab in Athens, Georgia, got quite different results: they found that mice given oseltamivir still got sick and 1 in 10 died. It is not clear why Kawaoka’s mice fared better.

What is more, all the safety precautions are aimed at preventing escape, not dealing with it should it occur. If any of Kawaoka’s lab workers are exposed to the virus despite all the precautions, and become infected despite taking oseltamivir, the consequences could be disastrous.

“I experienced disbelief…regarding the decision to relocate the reconstructed 1918 influenza strain from a BSL-4 facility to a BSL-3 facility, based on its susceptibility to antiviral medication,” Ronald Voorhees, chief medical officer at the New Mexico Department of Health, wrote on ProMED-mail, an infectious diseases mailing list.

Yet Kawaoka’s decision does comply with the US National Institutes of Health guidelines for BSL-3 agents: those causing “serious or lethal human disease for which preventive or therapeutic interventions may be [its italics] available”. In fact, he is considered unusually cautious. “Kawaoka should be applauded for using BSL-4 at all,” says Richard Webby, a flu researcher at St Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

Exposing monkeys
By contrast, the team in Georgia, the first to experiment with genetically engineered 1918 viruses, did all its work at BSL-3Ag. Meanwhile, Michael Katze at the University of Washington at Seattle is planning to expose monkeys to aerosols of 1918-type viruses at BSL-3, a step down from BSL-3Ag.
The recent SARS escapes were from BSL-3 labs.

“We would have to do any such work at BSL-4,” says John Wood of the UK’s National Institute for Biological Standards and Control.

In the US, the differing standards applied by different groups are due to the fact that experiments on engineered viruses such as the 1918 flu are approved on a case-by-case basis by Institutional Biosafety Committees (IBCs), composed of local scientists and officials. Critics say these are free to interpret the official guidelines in a way that suits them.
“There is no effective national system to ensure consistency, responsibility and good judgement in such research,” says Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project, a biosecurity pressure group in Austin, Texas. In a review of IBCs published this month, he found that many would not provide minutes of recent meetings as required by law.

He says the IBC that approved the planned 1918 flu study at the University of Washington considered only one scenario that could result in workers being exposed to airborne virus – the dropping of samples. Its solution: lab workers “will be trained to stop breathing”.

[tangent4ronpaul]

> considered only one scenario that could result in workers being exposed to airborne virus – the dropping of samples. Its solution: lab workers “will be trained to stop breathing”.

Wonder how that works for ya! :rolleyes:

-t

[tmosley]

The thing about the 1918 flu is that were it to happen today, we wouldn't even notice it. The vast majority of people who died from it died from secondary infections. Those secondary infections are now quite controllable. Indeed, I wonder if the standard flu we get every year isn't about the same in terms of virulence, given the increase in travel around the world these days.

Scaremongering over swine flu is a bit extreme. It's less infectious than regular flu.

[raiha]

Swine flu is now our primary winter flu (in NZ). 75% of our flu is now swine flu. It is not so mild. People i know who have had it have had a horrible time of it and thought they would die. Smokers beware. It really hits the lungs. Influenzinum 200c at the start of the season should protect. I've not had a sniffle this winter (touch wood); I work in a hospital, and they falling down around me like flies! And that's just the staff. Same old story, take responsibility for your own health, run a mile from anyone hovering in the wings with a syringe (for your own good) and bob's your uncle!