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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (22660)	3/15/2005 9:46:33 AM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81011

H5N1 evolves, so antibodies against an earlier version does not even assure protection for that person. H5N1 has been in the Hanoi area at least since 2001 and in China since at least 1996. There were no reported cases in Vietnam prior to Dec 2003, so there is no data showing that these earlier versions in Vietnam could cause disease in humans. Flu vaccines are made twice a year. The problem is the evolution of the virus. Blood drawn in 2004 from patients born before 1918 still had antibodies to the 1918 strain. However, that doesn't mean that they didn't get the flu in the past 80 years because those antibodies do not protect against more recent versions of flu. In the absence of a rising antibody titer, it is not clear that the asymptomatic cases were infected recently. The recovered cases may indeed represent a strain that is not as fatal. However, this leads to more infected people walking around and infecting others, which leads to further evolution, which would likely included a major increase in human to human transmission. The 1918 pandemic was caused by a virus with a 2-5% case fatality rate, so even a 90% drop in the current H5N1 would be more lethal than the 1918 pandemic strain.