Rhiza Labs FluTracker Forum

WHO was asked about that fact that the killer strains with D225G don't react with with the pandemic vaccine, and the response was no announcement was required because viruses change frequently:

One isolate from Ukraine with the mutation had changed so that swine flu vaccine probably would not protect against it well, Britain’s national medical laboratory reported Friday.

Flus mutate so fast, Dr. Fukuda cautioned, that announcing each change is “like reporting changes in the weather.”

Clearly the WHO statement reinforces the Bob Dylan song that states "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing".

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In the above NY Times article, WHO has acknowledged that the vaccine won't won't work against D225G, but doesn't think that vaccine failure is worthy of an announcement.

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Experts Say Swine Flu Mutations Do Not Warrant New Alarm By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
The World Health Organization tried this week to dampen fears about mutations seen in the swine flu virus in several countries, noting that both mutations had been found in very few people.

A change that created Tamiflu resistance has been found in about 75 people around the world, said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, chief flu adviser to the W.H.O.’s director general. Two clusters, in cancer units at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina and a hospital in Wales, were both among patients whose immune systems had been severely suppressed by cancer treatment; some had had their bone marrow, which produces infection-fighting white blood cells, wiped out so that replacement blood stem cells could be injected.

Such patients are more likely to develop resistant viruses when on Tamiflu because they can not clear a virus on their own. But the mutant strain appears not to spread easily in people with normal immunity, like hospital workers.

“We don’t know the full answer, but it is more likely that we are not seeing a major shift,” Dr. Fukuda said.

Widespread Tamiflu resistance is a serious problem in the seasonal H1N1 virus, but it has not crossed over into the swine H1N1.

Dr. Fukuda also said W.H.O. scientists were “not sure” of the level of threat posed by a separate mutation that helps the virus reach the lungs. It has been found in Norway, Ukraine, Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico and the United States, in both serious and mild cases.

Experts still need to see whether the mutation — whose shorthand name in virology is D222G or D225G — is becoming more common, and how often it leads to severe disease, he said.

One isolate from Ukraine with the mutation had changed so that swine flu vaccine probably would not protect against it well, Britain’s national medical laboratory reported Friday.

Flus mutate so fast, Dr. Fukuda cautioned, that announcing each change is “like reporting changes in the weather.”

More than 100 million swine flu shots have been administered in 40 countries, and the side effects are similar to or lower than those from regular flu shots, he added.

Six cases of anaphylaxis were widely reported in Canada when it was found that all were from one batch of vaccine, which was recalled. Anaphylaxis is an allergic reaction, usually to egg protein, that can range from mild hives to fatal airway swelling. All six patients recovered, and Dr. Fukuda pointed out that there were 172,000 doses in the batch, most of which caused no problems, so it was unclear whether the cause was a bad batch or just a coincidence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/healt ... nted=print

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There is a storm coming....

And you don't need a weatherman (or the WHO).

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And just how many people do they think P/H1N1 started in?

Hmmmm... Very few I think....

Commentary

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/11280 ... G_Vac.html

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The article stated that "they did not think it would work well". It did not say it would not work at all. It is like seasonal flu shots. Sometimes they do not work well. I understand we are on a different magnitude, but with Ukraine considering the amount of people that have had h1n1 and the amount of deaths, it is a very small ratio of deaths. Are all the 400 plus deaths due to the 225G? What about here in the US is that what is causing all the deaths. I am curious, I really do not know the answer. Why do so many people that have contracted the virus, live? Are we just at the beginning of this. I do not know. Who can give me a solid answer on this.

To Dr. Niman, the commentary about the WHO was excellent. Wow, that should really get some attention. I hope for all of the World.

Niman

The reveres seem a bit upset.

http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2 ... p#comments

As I said earlier, the propaganda machine would be in high gear. Revere's comments make for amusing readings. He is an MD at Boston University and has NO background or training in virology (and has NEVER published a virology paper). His field is epidemiology and cancer research, which is why he doesn't like to discuss sequences, and when he does he shows why. Any organism that replicates can undergo recombinaton as long as two genomes are in the same cell. He tries to argue that single stranded negative sense RNA viruse don't recombine, even though recombination has been demonstrated and published for Ebola, which is a negative sense RNA virus. Moreover, recombination of positive sense RNA viruses such as coronaviruses or picornarviruses has been established since the 1990's, so he even falls short on the history, but uses that as an arugument because that was one of the nonsense arguments made BEFORE recombination was demonstrated for Ebola, but NEVER made any sense because both negative and positive sense single stranded RNA viruses need to make a comlimentary strand to replicate, so ANYTHING that is alive and copies its genetic information can theoretically undergo homologous recombination.

Since he is an epidemiologist, he should be able to address how absurd it is that the same change (including silent chnages) would appear on multiple backgrounds at the same time, as seen in H274Y for Tamiflu resistance, or D225G for altered tissue tropism, but instead he does a lot of handwaving about areas he CLEARLY doesn't understand (and bans me so I can't post on his blog how absurd the nonsense is that he posts, especially with regard to recombination - but as an epidemiogist he couldn't even address the spread of H5N1 by wild bird, or the obvious H2H transmission in small clusters).

He does a good job of explaining science to a broad readership, but for sequences or recombination he is as lost as ever, and when he tries to get specific his lack of understanding in that area is as glaring as ever.

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