China, Egypt could be new-flu hot spots

Thanks to Crofblog.typepad for posting this one.

Via The Los Angeles Times: UCLA-led team predicts China, Egypt could be new-flu hot spots. Excerpt:

No one knows where the next deadly pandemic flu is likely to emerge. But a new analysis of flu surveillance and other data from a UCLA-led team suggests that coastal and central China and Egypt's Nile Delta might be areas worth watching. 

UCLA postdoctoral researcher Trevon Fuller and colleagues published their work online on March 13 in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The thinking behind their research goes something like this: 

Dangerous influenza outbreaks, including pandemics in 1957 and 1968 that killed around a million people apiece, arise when new, aggressive flu strains arise through a process known as reassortment. A single animal is infected with several flu viruses at the same time -- which then swap genetic bits to create new and sometimes deadly strains.  

Fuller and his colleagues used new techniques to assess conditions in a number of places to see how likely a reassortment event might be. While a new pandemic could possibly emerge from a number of combinations of flu strains, the team focused on reassortment between human H3N2, a version of which was prevalent in the U.S. this flu season; and avian H5N1, a widespread bird fluthat has been rare in humans so far but has proven deadly among the hundreds of people it has infected. 

 

via crofsblogs.typepad.com

Thanks to Crofblog.typepad for posting this one.

Via The Los Angeles Times: UCLA-led team predicts China, Egypt could be new-flu hot spots. Excerpt:

No one knows where the next deadly pandemic flu is likely to emerge. But a new analysis of flu surveillance and other data from a UCLA-led team suggests that coastal and central China and Egypt's Nile Delta might be areas worth watching. 

UCLA postdoctoral researcher Trevon Fuller and colleagues published their work online on March 13 in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The thinking behind their research goes something like this: 

Dangerous influenza outbreaks, including pandemics in 1957 and 1968 that killed around a million people apiece, arise when new, aggressive flu strains arise through a process known as reassortment. A single animal is infected with several flu viruses at the same time -- which then swap genetic bits to create new and sometimes deadly strains.  

Fuller and his colleagues used new techniques to assess conditions in a number of places to see how likely a reassortment event might be. While a new pandemic could possibly emerge from a number of combinations of flu strains, the team focused on reassortment between human H3N2, a version of which was prevalent in the U.S. this flu season; and avian H5N1, a widespread bird fluthat has been rare in humans so far but has proven deadly among the hundreds of people it has infected.