Avian Influenza May Be on Path To a Pandemic
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WASHINGTON – The strain of avian influenza that has led to the deaths of 140 million birds and 60 people in Asia in the past two years appears to be slowly acquiring the genetic changes characteristic of the “Spanish flu” virus that killed 50 million people nearly a century ago.
How far “bird flu” has traveled down the evolutionary path to becoming a pandemic virus is unknown. Nor is it certain the worrisome strain, designated influenza A/H5N1, will ever acquire all the genetic features necessary for rapid, worldwide spread.
Nevertheless, the similarities between the Spanish flu virus of 1918 and the H5N1 strain slowly spreading through Asia provide unusually concrete evidence of how dangerous the latter virus is.
“These H5N1 viruses might be acquiring the ability to adapt to humans, increasing their pandemic risk … there is a suggestion there may be some parallel evolution going on,” a molecular pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Md., Jeffery Taubenberger, said.
The comparison of the old and new influenza viruses is the first practical use of an extraordinary accomplishment whose completion was announced yesterday in two papers, one published in the journal Science and the other in its chief competitor, Nature.
After 10 years of work, Mr. Taubenberger and his team reported they had successfully reconstructed the Spanish flu virus, responsible for the deadliest epidemic since the Black Death of the Middle Ages. “Reborn” in mid-August at a high-security laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the pathogen has already been shown in animal experiments to be just as lethal as it was out in the world 87 years ago.
What makes the accomplishment so unusual is that no intact samples of the Spanish flu virus exist. When the pandemic occurred in 1918 and early 1919 – only American Samoa and parts of Iceland appear to have been spared – microbiologists didn’t know for certain what caused it. (Influenza virus wasn’t isolated and identified until 1933.) While biologists were able to deduce the broad family of influenza viruses that the 1918 strain came from, Spanish flu’s genetic identity was lost.
