The most effective antidote to avian flu is Tamiflu. It is available from Doctorcall at £50 per dose. To purchase supplies or for more information, call Peter Mills on 0844 264 0421.
What is pandemic flu?
A pandemic is a global outbreak of disease. A flu pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus emerges against which people have little or no immunity. The disease can therefore spread easily from person to person so serious illness can sweep around the world in weeks. No person or country is immune. Click here to see the main differences between ordinary flu and a pandemic.
In the flu pandemic of 1918, which was itself a kind of bird flu, deaths totalled over 40 million people worldwide – more than had been killed in the First World War which had just ended – with over 250,000 in Britain. Pandemic in 1957 and 1968 killed over 6 million and 4 million people worldwide respectively
How could it occur? How would the virus spread?
For the current strain of bid flu H5N1 to infect humans on a massive scale
it would first have to mutate.
Currently it is only easily transmitted between birds. Those people who have caught it have done so by being in close contact with birds and inhaling the virus from them in massive quantities.
It was first observed in Hong Kong and has been spread by migrating birds. It appeared in a number of South East Asian counties like North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. Next it appeared in Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Turkey, Iraq, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine and Hungary. By 2007 it had appeared in Britain.
Currently it lacks the ability to bind easily with human cells in the body so it seems to be only those who inhale massive quantities of it through working with infected birds who are affected.
But unfortunately a mutation to make it easier for the virus to pass from birds to people and then between people is far from impossible. It has happened before and can happen again – indeed, may top viral scientists believe it is likely. The H1, H2 and H3 viruses all needed only a couple of mutations to adapt to affect humans (though fortunately from the beginning they were less virulent than the H5N1 virus)
For a start, influenza viruses mutate constantly, a process known as ‘antigenic drift’.
There are two possible mechanisms by which the current bird flu virus could mutate so it would begin affecting humans on a mass scale. Firstly, the virus could mix with an ordinary flu virus. Technically, this is known as a ‘genetic reassortment’. It can occur when a person – or even a pig as pigs too are susceptible to both ordinary flu and avian flu – is infected by both simultaneously. A genetic transfer could take place which would create an entirely new easily-transmitted virus.
This is what occurred in the pandemic of 1918/19 which killed over 40 million people.
Besides this kind of Big Bang creation, which could create a sudden surge of cases, it is also possible that a pandemic flu virus could emerge by a more gradual step-by-step mutation. This would see the virus progressively improving its ability to bind with human cells until it reaches the point at which it vigorously replicates within the body and is easily passed from person to person.
At the moment the virus binds with a cell receptor in the lower lung known as Alpha 2-3 from where it finds it hard to break out. But a quite simple mutation could see it bind to cell receptors in the upper airways, known as Alpha 2-6 from where it could progress through the body and then to other people much more easily.
Droplets containing the virus are expelled from sufferers when they sneeze, cough or breath out, and these enter someone else through their nose, mouth or eyes. Some flu viruses can also be spread by touch.
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