Pigs as mixing vessels for novel pandemic influenza viruses
In an article to be published in the journal Microbial Pathogenesis , Chinese researchers report on a 4 year serological surveillance project of Influenza A on pigs farms in Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Yunnan Provinces in Southern China.[1] As the authors note, pigs are believe to be intermediate hosts or mixing vessels of pandemic influenza viruses. Influenza viruses can undergo reassortment in pigs, allowing the virus to adapted to humans and possibly cause a pandemic. The serological study used haemagglutination inhibition (HI) tests to examine antibodies of H5 and H9 viruses among the samples from pigs. The good news is that the researchers failed to find H5 infections (Clade 2.3.2) within the pig samples. A ressortant H5N1 virus from pigs could easily start the next pandemic. H5 viruses have already infected more than 600 people from numerous countries in the last decade, so an H5N1 pandemic is a serious concern. The bad news is that the authors found an infection rat...