- Bird flu could develop into a threat big enough to overturn
world order if it evolves to transfer directly from person to person, a
UK scientist says.
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- Dr John McCauley, of the Institute for Animal Health,
said the virus could be 20 times worse than the 1918 pandemic.
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- That is estimated to have killed 40 million people, with
later influenza outbreaks also killing millions more.
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- Dr McCauley said there was a realistic chance of the
current avian flu virus evolving to threaten people directly.
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- Dr McCauley, whose research into avian influenza is being
funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC),
was speaking to BBC News Online.
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- Practical possibility
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- He said: "At the moment the virus affects humans
only after transferring to them from poultry. In 1997, six people died
in Hong Kong after 18 became infected. This year, 23 patients have died
from a total of about 34 people infected in south-east Asia.
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- "That means there is a mortality rate from some
strains of highly pathogenic avian infuenza of between 30 and 60% of those
infected. In 1918, the rate was about 1%.
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- "There's no reason to say the virus will not continue
to evolve so that it can transmit directly from one person to another.
There's a realistic chance that could happen.
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- "If it does - if the virus becomes adapted to man
and can transmit efficiently - there'll be no point in selling a vaccine.
You might as well give it away at that stage, because money would be meaningless.
The world order would change."
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- Dr McCauley said the global flu epidemics of 1957 and
1968 had involved a mixing of avian and human forms of the virus, and it
looked as if that had happened in 1918 as well.
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- So people killing infected birds should be taking anti-flu
drugs to guard against the possibility of being infected with both forms
and creating a pandemic.
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- Dr McCauley said: "Any complacency could lead to
devastation for the UK poultry industry. I think the avian form of the
disease has not been cleared up in any of the affected countries."
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- Seeking answers
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- In poultry the effects of bird flu can range from a mild
touch of disease to a highly fatal and rapidly spreading epidemic.
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- Teams from the Institute for Animal Health and the universities
of Cambridge and Oxford are cooperating to unravel the dynamics of bird
flu.
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- Cambridge scientists, with the Roslin Institute, are
working to produce a breed of chicken that is genetically resistant to
infection by the virus, engineering the bird's cells to produce small molecules
of RNA that can selectively prevent its replication.
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- The BBSRC is to fund 14 new research projects costing
£11m ($19.5m) under its Combating Viral Diseases of Livestock Initiative.
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- © BBC MMIV http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3643643.stm
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