H5N1 Bird Flu ‘One Mutation Away’ to Become Global Pandemic!

United States: Federal data shows that at least 58 people in the US have been infected by the H5N1 bird flu virus this year.

Each but two of them had contact with cattle or poultry, the two species of animals in which H5N1 is prevalent.

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That’s, however, reassuring to scientists because that means people are getting sick through contact with infected animals and not by touching other people.

According to James Paulson, the study co-author and a professor in the department of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in California, the H5N1 strain, which is spreading among the US cattle, is certainly one mutation away from more easily binding to human cells, “a prerequisite for transmission among humans,” time.com reported.

Right now, in its current form, the H5N1 virus is a better-pronounced virus that targets some species of animals more than human beings.

It has affected more than 700 of the country’s dairy herds, with millions of birds and cows but comparatively few people. The vast majority of those human cases have been reported among farmworkers.

Lesser circulation among humans

That means, while the bird flu can’t do all that well at infecting people, it does so occasionally when people are exposed to high enough concentrations of the virus, such as through contact with infected animals, says Troy Sutton, an assistant professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences at Penn State University and who did not take part in the new research.

Because the virus can’t readily grow in the human nose and throat, people who get sick do not appear capable of easily spreading the disease through coughs and sneezes, as can be done with the normal flu sickness, says Sutton.

As Paulson added, in case the bird flu mutates enough to efficiently infect and grow in between people, “that’s how a pandemic starts,” time.com reported.

His team focused on the first step in that process: how the virus would need to evolve perfectly for it to attach itself to human cells conveniently.

In the lab, they worked with a chemical version of a gene from the viral strain that is circulating in cattle today.

The technology was used to make certain targeted mutations to investigate the effect of the shifts on the protein’s capability to bind to human cells.

As time.com reported, that’s quite ‘striking,’ as Sutton adds, and quite enough reason to stop more human cases to the extent possible.