New H7N9 virus could pose global threat

[curl-6]

JEMC said:

curl-6 said:

JEMC said:

I also hope that it is a one of those cases where it looks worse than it actually is.

The thing is, besides the pig flu that happened in America (I think), all of these rare flus have happened in China, where pollution and selling infected food are known problems. I don't know if those things as well as the possibility of using drugs on the animals are factors that are making these ills stronger/worse than they should be, it's the population that is weaker or (more probably) both things making it look worse.

In China, and otehr East Asian countries, large populations of humans, birds, and pigs live in close contact with each other. This facilitates both the transfer of bird viruses to people, but the mixing of bird and human strains in pigs, which can result in a mutant hybrid combining the high lethality of an avian flu with the high transmissibility of human flu.

The same happened in Europe 300/400 years ago and there was no flu... we had plague(s), but no flu.

In any case, these cases are still far from being the next Spanish flu, otherwise we would be already ill and maybe death. Worringly enough, the Spanish flu (also from the H1N1 variant) may also started with birds and pigs, and in China...

There was plenty of flu in Europe back then. The plague spread for the same reason; close contact allowing an animal disease to jump to people.

It's hard to judge against the Spanish Flu in terms of mortality because we don't have a good idea of its mortality yet; it seems very high but that might be because the mild cases are going unreported. The Spanish Flu had a 10-20% kill rate. (And is credited with wiping out 3-6% of the human population) What we can say is that H7N9 has so far not shown the ability to spread between people easily like the Spanish Flu could. (Though it's already better at infecting people than other bird flus)