Bird flu Virus Now Mutating

Detailed data on clustered human cases of avian flu have experts agreeing that the H5N1 virus is evolving – but in what direction? “The virus is always changing, and the mutations that make it more compatible with human transmission may occur at any time,” warn Drs. Webster and Govorkova, both virologists at St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. However, another expert believes that, so far, H5N1 has given no indication it is mutating toward human-to-human transmission. “It’s far from a certainty,” said Dr. Marc Siegel, a clinical associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine, and author of Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About the Next Pandemic. “The virus could move closer to human-to - human transmission, and it could move farther away. I don’t think that you can conclude from these articles in the NEJM that the thing is becoming easier to transmit.” The two studies’ most basic data is not new. They focus on three clusters of H5N1 infection in Indonesia in mid-to-late 2005, involving four deaths, and an eight-patient cluster treated in the first weeks of 2006 at a hospital in far-eastern Turkey where four of the Turkish patients died.

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