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Biotech / Medical : SARS and Avian Flu -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SG who wrote (2642)	10/13/2005 10:59:53 PM
From: Think4Yourself	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4232

Can't hurt, but probably won't protect you from H5N1 if it mutates. Flu shot is targeted at a specific strain. Here's another article saying H5N1 and the 1918 virus are very similar. The interesting thing here, at least to me, is that the 1918 virus jumped to humans WITHOUT first resequencing with a human flu virus. This suggests H5N1 could mutate and make the jump at any time. The more I learn about this, the less I want to know. newscientist.com The virus that caused the deadliest global pandemic ever recorded has frightening similarities with bird flu A LAB reconstruction of the 1918 flu virus, cause of the deadliest global pandemic ever recorded, is showing frightening similarities with H5N1, the bird flu that killed dozens of people across east Asia last year. The genetic sequences of the reconstructed 1918 virus show that it was a pure bird flu that adapted to humans, not a hybrid between a bird and a human flu like the relatively mild flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968. That is particularly worrying because H5N1 bird flu is steadily evolving to become more lethal in mammals without combining with a human flu. First Jeffery Taubenberger at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland, and colleagues isolated and sequenced the virus's genes from the preserved tissues of people who died after contracting the 1918 flu. They announced this week that in three previously unsequenced genes coding for the three-protein RNA polymerase complex, ...