NEWSWEEK – Combined infection with bird flu and human flu could lead to mutations of new viruses that could have dangerous public health consequences, agencies have warned.
This is following the news that mutations of bird flu have occurred within a Louisiana patient and a teenager from Canada who both suffered with severe symptoms, potentially raising the risk of serious human infection among others.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises on their website that Americans, particularly those at high risk of bird flu such as farmworkers, should get the flu vaccine this season, even though it only prevents seasonal flu.
“This is because it can reduce the prevalence and severity of seasonal flu and might reduce the very rare risk of coinfection with a human seasonal virus and avian virus at the same time, and the theoretical risk that reassortment between the two could result in a new virus,” the CDC says.
“Such dual infections, while very rare, could theoretically result in genetic reassortment of the two different influenza A viruses and lead to a new influenza A virus that has a different combination of genes, and which could pose a significant public health concern.”
Bird flu and some versions of human flu are very similar; bird flu is more formally known as avian influenza A(H5N1) and dominant strains of human flu include influenza A(H1N1) and influenza A(H3N2).
This means that all three of these variants of flu are different versions of influenza A, all of which use protein components called hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) …
