CDC Virologist: Swine Flu Origin Likely Not Mexico
ScienceInsider posted an illuminating (albeit rather technical) interview yesterday evening with Ruben Donis, chief of the molecular virology and vaccines branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In it, he explains the swift work CDC has done investigating the genetics of the swine flu virus.
The detective work, still underway, indicates that the virus is “almost equidistant to swine viruses from the United States and Eurasia…It doesn’t have any close relatives.” Donis says this suggests that the genetic mixing (which Aysha Akhtar explain in her article, “Flu Farms?“) probably didn’t happen in Mexico. Donis explains: “The amazing thing is the hemagglutinins [proteins on the surface of a flu virus] we are seeing in this strain are a lonely branch that have been evolving somewhere and we didn’t know about it.”
The exclusive interview is worth a full read.
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