Swine Flu Not an Accident From a Lab, W.H.O. Says

The swine flu virus did not result from a laboratory accident, the World Health Organization said Thursday, working to debunk rumors started by an Australian virologist and circulated by news outlets all over the world. “We took this very seriously,” Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the agency’s deputy director general, said of the virologist’s assertion. “But the evidence suggests that this is a naturally occurring virus, not a laboratory-derived virus.”

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The virus rumor was started by Adrian J. Gibbs, a retired plant virologist from the Australian National University, who previously published work in the journal Science questioning the idea, now accepted, that the 1918 pandemic started as a bird flu. Dr. Gibbs, who had studied the gene sequences of the swine flu virus posted on public data banks, argued that it must have been grown in eggs, the medium used in vaccine laboratories. He reached that conclusion, he said, because the new virus was not closely related to known ones and because it had more of the amino acid lysine and more mutations than typical strains of swine flu.

His theory was reported by Bloomberg News on Tuesday. Even though scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were skeptical and some prominent virologists openly derisive, news outlets have repeated and magnified the theory, adding speculation about bioterrorism that even Dr. Gibbs repudiated. He was also interviewed Thursday on the ABC News program “Good Morning America.” Dr. Fukuda said a W.H.O. panel of experts had concluded that “the hypothesis does not really stand up to scrutiny.” The lysine residues and mutation rates were typical, he said, and many swine flus seem unrelated because not enough pigs are tested each year.

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Late Thursday, Smithfield Foods reported that the Mexican health authorities had not found the new virus in herds at its huge hog-fattening operations in Veracruz, which some have blamed for the outbreak. But it was not clear what test was used; only blood tests for antibodies would show whether pigs had the virus in February, when the human outbreak is thought to have begun. ...(more@link)

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/health/policy/15flu.html

The number of global cases of the new influenza A(H1N1) virus has topped 7,700 worldwide, according to figures from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

The pan-European agency on Friday tallied 7,709 global cases including 234 in Europe.

The United States reported 4,298 cases. These included probable cases since US authorities as of Thursday included probable cases in their estimates, the ECDC said.
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The influenza has to date claimed 69 lives of which 64 were in Mexico, three in the United States, and one in both Canada and Costa Rica, the ECDC said.

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/swine-flu-cases-now-7709-worldwide-20090515-b5eg.html

Human noses too cold for bird flu

An Imperial College London recreation of the nose's environment found that at 32 degrees Celsius, avian flu viruses lose function and cannot spread.

It is likely that the viruses have adapted to suit the warmer 40 degree environments in the guts of birds.

A mutation would be needed before bird flu became a human problem, they said.

Published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, the study also found that human viruses are affected by the colder temperatures found in the nose but to nowhere near the same extent.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8050523.stm