As flu-watchers like to say, you can always count on influenza virus to surprise.
The latest revelation is that scientists have apparently been wrong about where new flu viruses come from. The dogma is that they always incubate in wild migratory birds, then get into domestic poultry, and then jump into mammals ? especially pigs and humans.
If novel flu viruses acquire the ability to transmit readily in humans ? boom! ? you've got a pandemic on your hands. And if a pandemic virus is particularly lethal, like the H5N1 bird flu virus that has made public health people anxious for the past 10 years, it could be a global catastrophe.
But evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey and his colleagues say that wild-bird scenario does not describe the true origin of the flu viruses that have troubled the world over the past 140 years.
Instead, the flu viruses circulating globally since the early 1870s are all closely related to those that infect an animal we don't associate with influenza these days: the horse.
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The latest revelation is that scientists have apparently been wrong about where new flu viruses come from. The dogma is that they always incubate in wild migratory birds, then get into domestic poultry, and then jump into mammals ? especially pigs and humans.
If novel flu viruses acquire the ability to transmit readily in humans ? boom! ? you've got a pandemic on your hands. And if a pandemic virus is particularly lethal, like the H5N1 bird flu virus that has made public health people anxious for the past 10 years, it could be a global catastrophe.
But evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey and his colleagues say that wild-bird scenario does not describe the true origin of the flu viruses that have troubled the world over the past 140 years.
Instead, the flu viruses circulating globally since the early 1870s are all closely related to those that infect an animal we don't associate with influenza these days: the horse.
...
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