Give us this day our daily dead. Working with scraps of human tissue preserved in the Alaskan permafrost, researchers have now resurrected the deadly Spanish Flu- the virus that killed 50 million in 1918. With the avian flu outbreak now on Europe's front doorstep in Turkey and Romania, the news of similarities between the 1918 virus and today's virus are extremely unsettling. It is one thing to have an outbreak in a country with a national health care system: there at least, some measures of preparedness are already in place.
In Bush World, that strange, alternate country that we all entered when the GOP stole the election in 2000, there is no preparedness--- and very little public concern, until the past week. Mired deeply in denial and corporate cronyism, this gang can not shoot straight. Whether it is Storm Katrina or storm Iraq, or the storm in your cranium when you fill up the car, these jokers are out- to- lunch, incompetant and unfeeling.
From the Los Angeles Dog Trainer, Oct. 6, an article titled " Scientists Find Clues in 1918 Flu Virus ", with some details about what we may be facing should the avian flu come to these shores.
" The ( 1918 ) virus has eight genes, but two of them proved to be most crucial. One.... is the blueprint for hemmagglutinin, the protein that allows the virus to latch onto human cells before invading them. The second is polymerase, which helps the virus replicate.
The researchers found that the 1918 hemagglutinin gene has two mutations that convert it into an infectious powerhouse. Normal flu viruses rely on enzymes in the lung cells they invade to cleave and activate the protein, allowing it to enter cells.
The mutations in the 1918 gene eliminate this requirement, so that the virus can enter virtuallt any cell it encounters. Studies of the intact virus in mice.... showed that it could enter and kill virtually all lung cells, including those deep inside the lung that normally escape infection. As a consequence, the 1918 virus killed mice within three to five days. Other flu viruses are rarely lethal to the species.
The current avian flu virus differs from the 1918 virus in that it passes from human to human only with great difficulty. "
So, not to worry right ? Homeland Security and Mike Leavitt and the CDC will take care of everything. Ha ! If you beleive that, take into account how there are still 22,000 citizens in disaster shelters more than a month after Katrina.
Here we are, just a few mutations away from a pandemic - from a public health disaster !!!! Like the Martian invaders in H.G. Wells " War of the Worlds ", we may well be brought to our knees by the tiniest microbe. ( Maybe that is not such a bad thing, - lest George toasts the Middle East in preemptive nuke strikes. )
" Given a few molecular changes in an avian virus, it has the potential to go into a human host and raise havoc," said biologist Terrence M. Tumpey of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ".
Bring out your dead.
