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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (42661)	10/6/2005 9:06:15 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 361203

LOL Here's what I found, the virus was isolated in 1997...at that time the concensus was mammal to man, which is why the avian flu thing doesn't work for me. Additionally, the 1918 pandemic began and finished within the space of months. Avian flu seems to work slowly. Here's one excerpt: Well, we found small fragments of the viral RNA, the genetic material, in this case. The tissue is--the genetic material is quite degraded in this sample, and so we can only look at very small pieces at a time and, in a sense, put them together like a puzzle. But what we find is that it's a virus that does not match any strain of influenza virus isolated since, but it is most related to the kind of influenzas that infect swine, suggesting that this influenza entered the human population after being passaged through pigs. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You are now trying to put together more of the DNA. And what are you looking for exactly? Are you trying to figure out what there was in this DNA that made it so lethal to humans? DR. JEFFREY TAUBENBERGER: Right. The ultimate goal of the project would be to see if there is a genetic basis for why this particular virus was so virulent. Influenza viruses mutate. Continually new strains arise, which is why vaccines have to be made every year to match the current strain. And this kind of thing could certainly happen again. And if we could get a global understanding of how you would relate the genetic structure of a virus to its virulence, we would be able to predict future epidemics. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How could it happen again if the flu viruses--there have been two pandemics of flu--with what ‘68 and ‘57, something like that--