Know your ferrets
From the New York Times:A picture in Science Times yesterday with an article about efforts to determine what might make the avian flu virus more contagious in people was published in error. Tests of hybrid viruses that combine bird flu and a human flu are being done on domestic ferrets; the picture showed a different species, the black-footed ferret. (Go to Article)
newspapers, media, errors, animals
posted by Unknown @ 8/02/2006 01:59:00 PM
1 Comments:
You may want to see the following post by one of the bloggers on our site:
01/08: BIRD FLU CREATION vs BIRD FLU EVOLUTION
Category: General Posted by: jmtom Add comment Edit item
I found this news item, by Peter Aldhous, who writes with great erudition, at the New Scientist.
There was this great big headline, "Bird Flu Mixed With Human Flu Lacks Punch".
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientists have apparently tried to infect ferrets, with genes from the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, mixed with those from a common human flu virus and have failed to infect the healthy ferrets with the hybrid virus.
Great news!
This means that the Human Bird Flu virus will not prove deadly for all of us.
Well, not really :(
Because, the same news item, tells you some thing totally different, from the message conveyed by the HEADLINE, a bit later in the news item.
However this important and very relevant fact, is provided only to the reader, who bothers to go all the way down to the bottom of the news item.
I suppose you do need a bit of suspense in your news items!
You are told in the last two lines of this news item, that:
"the virus that caused the 1918 pandemic, which killed more than 40 million people, PROBABLY EVOLVED BY THE MUTATION OF A BIRD FLU STRAIN rather than RECOMBINATION WITH A HUMAN VIRUS."
WHAT was that?
Well, the ferrets may not have caught the virus at the hands of the scientists at the CDC, but there are plenty of Humans in Indonesia and now in Thailand, who seem to be going down, with the plain old slowly mutating via natural evolution, Bird Flu virus.
Do you think this will help those who believe in EVOLUTION as opposed to CREATION???
Here is the above mentioned news item:
Bird flu mixed with human flu lacks punch
18:04 01 August 2006 NewScientist.com news service
Peter Aldhous
Combining genes from the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus with those from a common human flu virus does not seem to create strains with instant pandemic potential, researchers have found.
H5N1 meets two of three requirements for a pandemic strain: it is highly pathogenic and unfamiliar to most people’s immune systems. If it also acquired the ability to transmit easily from person to person, H5N1 would threaten millions of lives. One way this could happen is if the virus swapped genes with human flu.
A team at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, engineered flu viruses that contained genes for the external “coat” proteins of H5N1 and the internal proteins of H3N2, the most common variety of human flu in circulation.
They then inoculated ferrets with these “reassortant” viruses. When ferrets are in adjacent cages, H3N2 passes readily from one cage to the next. But neither H5N1, nor the new viruses, could be transmitted in this way, and the engineered strains were much less pathogenic than H5N1.
This suggests it may take more than a simple exchange of genes to turn H5N1 into a global killer, although the team has yet to explore other possible reassortants.
Mutation not recombination
However, the virus that caused the 1918 pandemic, which killed more than 40 million people, probably evolved by the mutation of a bird flu strain rather than recombination with a human virus.
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