Resuters reports: "Dutch destroy 190,000 ducks in first bird flu cull"
Whenever flu breaks out, bids get slaughtered. While this news article may seem unique,
these practices have contained outbreaks for decades. The term “bird flu” gets thrown around a lot,
but what exactly is bird flu? Why are we
so scared of avian-based flus?
What we commonly refer to as “bird flu”, is actually a
strain of influenza A virus, and birds are the natural reservoir for influenza
A. Influenza A is divided into two
subtypes based on two specific proteins on the surface of the virus,
hemagglutinin (HA), and neuraminidase (NA), with 18 known HA subtypes and 11
known NA subtypes. The different
combinations of HA and NA make the influenza A strains, thus the infamous H5N1
virus designates influenza A with HA protein 5 and NA protein 1. Birds show no symptoms for, and are the reservoir
for influenza A, and when a virus is able to cross into the human population–we’ve
got a problem.
We are scared of bird flus because they are historically
incredibly pathogenic, meaning they are extremely likely to cause devastating
diseases. For example, the H1N1 virus
was responsible for the 1918-1919 flu pandemic that killed an estimated 50
million people worldwide, infected 500 million, and considering the world’s
population was a mere 1.8 billion–this virus was devastating. Thus, whenever we detect a H–N– strain in
birds we kill them all, before their viruses kill us all.
-Cynthia Taylor
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/influenza-a-virus-subtypes.htm
http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0979_article
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