A Quick Primer on Flu Strains

This Reuters article posted today gives a quick primer on different strains of avian flu, how dangerous they are, and where they can spread. It also explains the technical term "pathogenicity"--important to know to distinguish among how relatively dangerous different strains are.

The Risk of Pandemic Flu from Human Error

Emergency hospital during 1918 influenza epidemic, Camp Funston, Kansas
(U.S. Army photographer; photo in public domain).
It is estimated that 50 million or more people worldwide died during this pandemic

Today in the online magazine Business Insider, an article by Kevin Loria depicts what I consider to be one of the greatest risks regarding the rise of pandemic flu: the escape from a research lab of a flu virus engineered for maximum contagiousness and lethality.

Science fiction, you say? Couldn't happen, you say? Guess again.

Yes, this has often been a theme of science fiction (as in Stephen King's 1978/1990 novel The Stand, later a 1994 television miniseries). But although a fictional treatment is certainly no proof that something could actually occur, the converse is also true: the fact that something has been treated as a theme in fiction is no proof that it could not actually occur.

Just this week, as Loria's article notes, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that it had kept a supply of smallpox virus in a lab that was not sufficiently prepared to guard the public from an accidental release of the virus. Smallpox virus, of course, is so dangerous that, by international agreement, only two laboratories in the world are allowed to possess it. Yet this location was not one of those two laboratories!

As Loria reports, labs worldwide are engaging in flu research--including the engineering of flu viruses that are modified to increase their contagiousness and lethality. However, as Loria notes:

In a New York Times op-ed on the risks of some current flu studies, [Harvard professor Marc] Lipsitch points out that "between 2003 and 2009, there were 395 'potential release events' and 66 'potential loss events' in American labs involving select agents, a category that includes many of the most lethal bacteria and viruses."

Considering whether such mistakes could actually lead to widespread infection is not just hypothetical. In fact, the best current explanation for a 1977 H1N1 outbreak in China and Russia is that the virus escaped from a lab.

The bottom line: whenever human judgment and action are involved, mistakes and accidents will happen. When these mistakes or accidents involve deadly flu viruses, the consequences could be catastrophic. With such risks around us, we would be wise to be prepared to survive pandemic flu.