The H1N1 "swine" flu virus used a biochemical trick to spread efficiently in humans, according to a new study released on Thursday.
The virus caused a worldwide epidemic in 2009-10 that sickened up to 34 million Americans alone and caused up to an estimated 6,000 deaths in the U.S.
The report in the current issue of Public Library of Science Pathogens said H1N1 used a different way to jump from an animal host to humans than what was previously discovered by scientists.
Yoshihiro Kawaoka, professor of pathobiological sciences at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and one of the world's leading influenza experts, said the discovery of the mutation in the H1N1 virus helps explain how the virus replicated so well in humans.
"This gives us another marker to help predict the possibility of future flu pandemics," Kawaoka said in a news release from the UW-Madison news serivce.
The H1N1 virus, Kawaoka said, is a combination of four different bird and swine flu viruses that have emerged over the past 90 years and even includes genetic residue of the 1918 pandemic virus, a flu that killed up to 20 million people around the world.
The puzzle over H1N1 was that it didn't have two amino acid building blocks found on specific locations on a key avian protein -- amino acids thought to be necessary to allow the virus to jump to humans.
One of the amino acids, lysine, was since found through studies to reside in a different location on the protein, enabling H1N1 to adapt and move to human cells.
madison.com
Source: newsroom - meattradenewsdaily.co.uk
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