中国での鶏インフルエンザA(H7N9)の流行で、現在まで6人の感染死亡患者と21人の感染患者が確認、上海の鳥市場では、何万羽の鶏が殺害処分に。
H7N9: la gripe de Shanghái
Los epidemiólogos están en alerta ante el nuevo virus, que ha saltado a las personas
La infección de una paloma provoca el sacrificio de miles de aves
Shanghái se prepara para una epidemia de gripe aviar
La gripe aviar sobrevuela China otra vez
El primer virus de la nueva era
Javier Sampedro Madrid 7 ABR 2013 - 21:47 CET
H7N9: Flu Shanghai
Epidemiologists are on alert for the new virus that has jumped to people
The infection causes a pigeon slaughter of thousands of birds
Shanghai is preparing for a bird flu epidemic
China Bird flu flies again
The first virus of the new era
Javier Sampedro Madrid 7 ABR 2013 - 21:47 CET
The nomenclature of influenza virus has so far been a real nuisance for scientists, journalists and readers. We've all missed in recent years the salt and sloppiness with which the ancient baptized these epidemics, from the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1998 avian influenza pandemic through Hong Kong SARS and other denominations enigmatic and exotic . Then came the h's and n's, H1N1, H3N2, H5N1, which plunged us all into perplexity alphanumeric. And we just fell over that in other times would have been called the 'outbreak of Shanghai' but now accounts for H7N9, so mind, readers.
Since China acknowledged earlier this month the first two deaths from a new type of bird flu, the human toll has been leaking up to six (see accompanying article). If you consider that conventional flu-that which annoys us one week each winter-season kills half a million people each year, H7N9 statistics may seem inconsequential. But epidemiologists are the creeps put any new influenza virus that attacks people. They have very solid scientific reasons for this, but rarely have the public understanding and, above all, of the CEOs of livestock and public health.
The mere identification of a dove positive for H7N9 virus for the first time in a live animal sacrifice-led preventive yesterday several thousand birds in the markets of Shanghai, the second most populous city in the world. As in Beijing and Hong Kong, the dazzling glass and steel skyscrapers of Shanghai that usually appear in the pages of the press salmon coexist with medieval markets live animals, has long been of concern to virologists and epidemiologists from all countries.
Live animal markets are focus of infectious agents exchange
Exchanges of infectious agents and viral genes cocktails that occur in these spaces are the prime suspects in cooking emerging epidemics which from time to time shake the planet. Virus of avian origin which people have never been exposed, and against which the human immune system is vulnerable as a virgin and suffered his first collegiate hazing in high school. No wonder the Chinese government has put all hospitals in Shanghai and neighboring provinces on high alert.
The clarity and transparency with which the National Health Committee of the great Asian power is reacting to this crisis, or rather contrasted kicks-occurs with opaque and irrational tradition that has been the hallmark of Beijing during the last two decades , and procured him the unanimous condemnation of the international scientific community.
Opacity is a breeding ground for the spread of epidemics
The stubbornness of the Chinese government to hide the AIDS epidemic in the country, and particularly in the agricultural provinces away from the big cities of the East coast, was a major stimulus to the spread of a virus that greatly benefits from ignorance their hosts, and the same happened with the SARS epidemic and the first flu outbreaks century.
The public health policy of the Asian giant, however, has evolved rapidly in the last decade. First, because the Chinese government has perceived that collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the best scientists of the world influenza experts can only contribute to the containment of their own pests. Second, because one of the central nodes of the global epidemiology is in its territory, at the University of Hong Kong.
And third, because a viral outbreak hide today is just the best way to light a fuse also viral on social networks, even though the authorities in censoring empecinen. The opacity is not only the best breeding ground for the spread of a virus, but also for panic. Each government denial masks sales multiplied by Shanghai markets. If the virus has spread to Beijing and Hong Kong, deny not stop the panic, no masks sales in those cities. Informing the public is the best barrier to stop the spread of the virus. And the fear, which only serves to complicate things, as has been evident in previous alerts.
H and N means hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, the two coat proteins of any influenza virus, and the numbers that follow (as H7N9) designate major subtypes of these two proteins. H1, for example, is the main type of viral hemagglutinin in human influenza virus since at least 1918, when a virus of this kind jumped from birds to humans and killed 50 million people.
That is twice the casualties caused by the Great War (World War I), which ended just the same year. The current concern of epidemiologists has a lot to do with that massive slaughter and forgotten. The name of 'Spanish flu', incidentally, is a curious historical injustice at an angle on press freedom. The media of the countries involved in World War I were forbidden to report on the epidemic for not demoralize the troops, and Spanish newspapers were the only talked about one of the worst health crises in recorded history. In fact, the Spanish flu emerged in a military camp in Kansas and spread to Europe with American soldiers mobilized for the war. Another silence fatal.
H7 viruses (such as the current H7N9) normally circulate in birds, like almost all flu viruses. Some of them (H7N2, H7N3, H7N7) were detected in human outbreaks before limited, but this is the first time that an H7N9 virus has jumped to the human species, at least as recorded in the records of WHO. Patients, as with other infectious agents of this family, suffering from high fever, cough, dyspnoea, and, at least in the few cases described so far, a severe pneumonia that threatens his life.
It was not immediately clear how people drive, or why the cases have begun to realize now though the virus takes decades to circulate in birds in China. Studies of the genetic sequence of the virus isolated from the human victims indicate, according to scientists at the WHO, that their genes of avian origin have been partially adapted to mammals. The coat proteins of the virus are now more similar to human cells than the original avian virus, and metabolism of the infective agent has accommodated temperatures (near 37 degrees) that prevail in our tissues.
This is the great general problem that worries scientists. Just a year ago that the modification in the laboratory of another avian virus, H5N1, this agent gave high capacity transmission between ferrets, the classical model for human influenza research. These works exorbitaron the eyes of security advisers in the White House, which were not enough to understand the reason for these experiments.
But the argument that scientists did not only won then, but is now more alive than ever: the vkirus H5N1 circulating in nature already earned for himself some of the same changes that they had induced in the laboratory. For all we know, the same is true of new infectious agent of influenza in Shanghai. H7N9, another riddle alphanumeric we'll have to get used to.
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