Article <vj34eu$3is2n$1@dont-email.me>

Deutsch English Français Italiano
<vj34eu$3is2n$1@dont-email.me>

View for Bookmarking (what is this?)
Look up another Usenet article
Path: ...!news.nobody.at!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!newsfeed.xs3.de!nntp-feed.chiark.greenend.org.uk!ewrotcd!news.eyrie.org!beagle.ediacara.org!.POSTED.beagle.ediacara.org!not-for-mail
From: RonO <rokimoto557@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Why hasn't the bird flu pandemic started?
Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2024 21:40:11 -0600
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 52
Sender: to%beagle.ediacara.org
Approved: moderator@beagle.ediacara.org
Message-ID: <vj34eu$3is2n$1@dont-email.me>
Reply-To: rokimoto557@gmail.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Injection-Info: beagle.ediacara.org; posting-host="beagle.ediacara.org:3.132.105.89";
	logging-data="25750"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@beagle.ediacara.org"
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
To: talk-origins@moderators.isc.org
Cancel-Lock: sha1:/ZGaLmkRvFTQ8jEHuUTAeGFyWQU=
Content-Language: en-US
Bytes: 5629

https://www.science.org/content/article/why-hasn-t-bird-flu-pandemic-started

The science news article is talking about the H5N1.  They know that they 
are talking about a recombinant (reassorted) virus, but choose to just 
refer to it by the H5 designation of 2.3.4.4b.  That is the H5 
designation of the virus that had high mortality in the humans that it 
infected in Europe and Asia, but the current dairy virus is genotype 
B3.13 that is a reassorted virus that has half it's genome from two 
other avian influenza.  One of which I have learned was a low pathogenic 
avian virus.  There are low path and high path avian influenza strains 
and the high path viruses like the dairy variant require flocks to be 
depopulated, but low path virus are survivable.  The dairy variant 
produces minor symptoms in humans at this time, and does not have the 
same mortality rate as the Asian virus.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11271078/

The dairy variant is pretty distantly related to the original 2.3.4.4b 
H5 sequence.  You can get an idea of how different the virus is from 
Figure 1 of the above link.  Figure 1 is based on RNA sequence of the H5 
gene, so around 2/3rds of those changes might change the amino acid 
sequence. I do not know when they start calling a clade something other 
than H5.  It looks like as long as you can trace the lineage back to the 
original H5 designation, that is what it is characterized as even though 
the antigenicisty of the protein has changed.  They had to make a 
synthetic H5 gene with the two amino acid substitutions that the 
Missouri patient had because the H5 antigens that they had to screen for 
antibodies circulating in the patients blood were not effectively bound 
by those antibodies.  They had to create a new H5 sequence that would be 
neutralized by the patient's antibodies, and even then only one assay 
was positive.  Two of the antibody assays failed.  This probably means 
that the H5 vaccine that the CDC stockpiled is probably going to be 
worthless once the virus does switch to human infection.

The Science news article does identify the genotype of the virus that 
infected the Canadian teenager (genotype D1.1) that is a different 
reassorted virus, and it looks like it does cause severe symptoms 
because the teen was in critical condition when diagnosed.  We seem to 
be lucky that the dairy virus has such mild symptoms in humans.

No one knows how bad things will get if the virus does adapt to humans, 
but we should not want to find out.  That is why the CDC's and USDA's 
response has been so pathetically lame.  The news article notes that 
recent research indicates that just a single amino acid change will 
allow the dairy virus to better infect humans.  We have been extremely 
lucky that, that has not happened.  It may be that the current sequence 
is selected for to effectively infect dairy cattle, and the human 
facilitating mutation would be more likely to occur and amplify in 
humans.  That is even more reason to identify all the infected herds and 
protect the dairy workers.

Ron Okimoto