Robin Cook may be trying to drum up business for a book he wrote in 1995, but he can sure scare the hell out of me this year.
But that is not the case with another flu subspecies that originally appeared in 2006 and which is now slowly spreading from Southeast Asia, particularly in its normal reservoir of aquatic birds. This is the subspecies designated HPAI A(H5N1), standing for “highly pathogenic avian influenza A of subtype H5N1,” or avian flu for short. Luckily it has very low transmissibility — which it makes up for with knock-your-socks-off lethality. A truly scary percentage, about 60 percent, of those humans unlucky enough to have contracted the illness over the last three years have quickly died.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem. Is there a chance these two subspecies could hook up and help each other? The answer is definitely yes, and that is the worry because one of influenza A’s most disturbing characteristics is its ability to indulge in recombination of its 11 genes, which are arranged on its eight pieces of RNA. This produces what is called genetic shift — in other words, transfer of entire genes or gene combinations, and hence traits. It will become key to our plot.
Robin is writing about pandemics and risk. Read the whole thing.