A new strain of influenza has brought social media to an apocalyptic panic.
Getty Photos / China
the coronavirus the pandemic is not even close to ending and if you read the latest headlines there is a potential new pandemic around the corner. This is caused by the flu, the virus that causes the “flu,” and the culprit was discovered circulating in pigs in China.
But, the headlines are exaggerating a bit. Let’s make things clear.
Several reports on a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, have led social media to panic at the apocalyptic endgame scenarios, worrying many that we are seeing a double pandemic. that it will end and that we retreat to our bunkers in the hills.
The study examined pig populations in China from 2011 to 2018, taking thousands of swabs from slaughtered breeding pigs and testing them for influenza viruses. The research team discovered a strain similar to H1N1 flu, the virus that caused a pandemic in 2009, which had become more dominant in Chinese pig populations since 2016.
Nicknamed G4, the researchers showed that the strain was the leading strain of influenza in the pig population they tested in 2018 and that it can infect people. About 10% of those exposed to animals had antibodies against the strain.
But the virus has been circulating since 2016 and must still cause significant illness, and it’s unclear if it can even do that. There is also no evidence that it has spread from human to human. For a pandemic to start, the virus needs to do both by gathering new genetic information. Could that happen? Yes. Should you panic?
Well, no. While current flu vaccines do not protect against this strain, the next batch could be designed to provide protection if this virus reached pandemic proportions. But that is still a great yes.
Surveillance of influenza strains provides a valuable tool for epidemiologists and public health authorities as it enables them to detect vulnerable populations and better understand whether the virus is evolving to become more virulent. The researchers suggest that G4 should be closely monitored in pigs and in human populations.
It is worth reading the Twitter threads composed by Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, and a similar thread by Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle. Both analyze where some of the misunderstandings come from by detailing the experiments and how they relate to the headlines.
“The bottom line is that our understanding of what a potential strain of pandemic influenza is is limited,” writes Rasmussen. “Sure, this virus meets many of the basic criteria, but it is not certain that it will cause a hypothetical 2020 flu pandemic, or even be a dominant strain in humans.”
“People are worth watching in the field,” says Bergstrom. “There is no immediate threat to public health.”
Here it is also important to lower the curtain a little. The magazine in which this work was published, PNAS, sends a weekly list of articles from embargoed magazines that it will publish in the next seven days to the media. In this week’s email, reference was made to a study titled “Swine Flu Viruses with Pandemic Potential.” It’s a pretty eye-catching headline, and not exactly incorrect, but it’s written to entice the media to take an interest in telling the story of the investigation.
And that’s where the panic begins. The magazine article itself refers to the idea that pigs are particularly good “mixing vessels” for influenza viruses because they allow different strains of influenza to exchange genetic information with each other. These exchanges could lead to viruses that are more likely to infect humans and cause disease. It is the only reference to the “pandemic potential” made in the document.
The magazine article exists behind a pay wall, making the full seven-page article not freely available to the public. A similar situation occurred in May with an article published by New Scientist that was unearthed to claim that NASA had found a parallel universe where time runs backwards. Revelation: (Sadly) there was, and we are trapped with this universe.
During the coronavirus pandemic, scientists, researchers, the media, and the public have had to deal with an “infodemic,” as the World Health Organization calls it. An infodemic is an excess of information, both accurate and not so precise, that it makes it extremely difficult to find reliable sources.
Would we have seen the “pandemic potential” flu take so much steam if we weren’t already in a pandemic that gave it everything? My guess would be no.
See this:
How to follow the pandemic with online tools
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