Snow, You are going to be amazed at the changes in the next 12 months. Lots of areas converging to lead to a paradigm shift in how infectious diseases are viewed and attacked
recombinomics.com
This will lead to designer vaccines and will include new methods to rapidly manufacture a wide range of vaccines. The viruses rapidly change via recombination, not via new mutations. Thus, vaccine development can be quite predictable and can also be individualized. So far the virus has the upper hand because of some very basic misunderstandings on how viruses evolve, but this will change very soon.
Recombination has reached a critical mass, so new outbreaks will be happening at an ever quickening pace. This year will be much worse than last year on the avian influenza front. There is much too much genetic instability, which is why there were so many outbreaks in the past few years - like H7N7 in The Netherlands (easily spread human to human but the virus was not very virulent), H3N8 in Florida racing greyhounds earlier this year ( a first for avian flu in dogs), and the massive outbreaks of H5N1 (throughout eastern Asia with record high numbers of human cases, as well as first time reports of infections in wild and domestic cats).
The number of dual infections involving H9N2 and H5N1 seems to be at an all time high, leading to lots of news stories, including human to human transmission
recombinomics.com
This year will be a major mess with flu vaccine shortages and unprecedented levels of recombination, leading much death and destruction in Asia. If efficient human to human transmission happens also, the pandemic could easily rival 1918-1919, which would create chaos (worldwide) and some major changes on how infections are fought - and designer vaccines will be at the top of the list. |
