Flu News
by ilene - January 5th, 2010 10:32 pm
Here’s the latest by Dr. Henry Niman. I’ve made a few helpful comments in red. – Ilene
D225E and D225N H1N1 RBD Changes in Turkey
Courtesy of Henry Niman, PhD
Recombinomics Commentary
January 5, 2010
The Refik Saydam National Public Health Agency has released 29 HA [hemagglutinin] sequences from Ankara, Turkey. Several were partial sequences, but 26 covered the receptor binding domain and 8 had D225E,… while one had D225N,…
My comment: D225 is the most common or wild-type receptor binding protein - the hemagglutinin (HA) protein – which enables the virus to bind to tissues in the respiratory tract of infected people.
A change in the amino acid in position 225 of the receptor binding domain (RBD) is symbolized by using the letter representing the new amino acid, e.g. "G" for glycine in "D225G." The marker D225G signifies that a glycine (G) is present in the 225 position, replacing the amino acid usually in this position, aspartic acid, or D (hence the wild-type marker is "D225"). Glutamic acid, E, and asparagine, N, are two other amino acids that have been found in this position in non-wild-type swine flu viruses.
The change in the receptor binding protein from D to G alters the protein’s preference for binding to human tissues. Viruses with the D225G marker bind in the lung tissue, rather than binding in the upper respiratory tract (nasal area and throat), the more typical target. This appears to result in more severe disesase which may trigger a "cytokine storm" reaction in the lungs. Whether substitution with "E" or "N" causes similar changes is not known. Theoretically, if the immune response is generated against the wild-type protein D225, viruses with D225G, D225E or D225N markers might avoid the immune system’s response.
[Back to Dr. Niman] The outcomes of these patients were not given but media reports have described a rapid in increase in H1N1 fatalities in Turkey. A large number of HA sequences with D225E has been published from Spain, and recently released GISAID sequences from Sweden and the UK also have D225E, including three fatal cases from Sweden. The prior reports of D225G and D225N associations with fatal cases has raised concerns that changes at position 225 could alter tissue tropism or aid in immune escape, leading to more severe and fatal cases.
When is a flu pandemic not a flu pandemic?
by ilene - May 22nd, 2009 3:12 pm
If you’d like a free subscription to PSW Report, just click on the icon below and sign yourself up (no credit card required!):
Flu Watch Update – Ilene
When is a flu pandemic not a flu pandemic?
By Debora MacKenzie, consultant at New Scientist
H1N1 swine flu continues to roam the planet. In the US, cases are thought to be in the hundreds of thousands. In Japan, hundreds of teenagers have caught it, despite no obvious connections with Mexico or the US.
Yet in Europe, health authorities are not testing widely for it and are prescribing drugs as though they could still contain it. And in Geneva, health ministers have fought this week to keep the World Health Organization from following its own rules and calling this a pandemic.
So are we in a pandemic or not? And have we got the whole idea of a flu pandemic completely wrong?
No. There has been a phenomenal mismatch between quite sensible rules about how to declare a flu pandemic, and equally sensible rules about how to respond. The mismatch was wholly predictable, yet somehow no one saw this coming.
The WHO rules for declaring different degrees of flu pandemic threat are based on epidemiology (how the virus is spreading) for good reasons. This is because any new flu virus to which most of the world has little immunity, and which spreads well enough person-to-person to escape its continent of origin, is very likely to go global, and to cause more sickness and death than flu usually does. That is the definition of a flu pandemic…
…As I write, the number of confirmed cases in Japan (and that’s just people sick enough to see a doctor and get tested) has jumped by 35 in the past 24 hours, to nearly 300, mostly due to that perennial vector of flu, the gregarious teenager. The main cluster started without any known links to the Americas.…