tailieunhanh - Báo cáo sinh học: "Influenza: one or two more questions"

Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về sinh học được đăng trên tạp chí sinh học Journal of Biology đề tài: Influenza: one or two more questions. | Journal of Biology BioMed Central Editorial Influenza one or two more questions Miranda Robertson When we asked Peter Doherty to write a question-and-answer piece on influenza 1 Australia where he is based had one reported case of influenza A H1N1 . At the time of writing this editorial Australia has more than 1 200 cases though to date no deaths and has triggered the announcement by WHO of a global pandemic. Received wisdom has it that pathogens are not generally lethal to the hosts they normally infect because they could not survive if they were. Pathogenicity thus becomes adapted to a level at which the host survives to become reinfected or to produce young that become infected . The most notable example of such adaptation is in the herpesviruses which have evolved a quite extraordinary repertoire of devices for avoiding human immunity and with which most human adults in the Western world are chronically infected. Herpesviruses persist through latency. Influenza virus belongs to a different strategic class which proliferates rapidly and escapes in coughs and sneezes leaving the host immune. Most humans survive infection with human influenza viruses but the adaptive truce may break down when the human viruses recombine with viruses of avian or swine origin hence the high human mortality associated with the H5N1 avian influenza virus that emerged into public consciousness in 2005. The so-called swine H1N1 influenza virus that is the cause of the current pandemic is apparently a triple- reassortant with genes of swine human and avian origin 2 3 . Unlike H5N1 it is readily transmissible between humans but it seems - so far at least - otherwise less uncouth and in most people causes only mild disease so perhaps in respect both of transmissibility and of pathogenicity it reflects its human rather than its swine or avian origins. What makes this virus particularly dangerous as Peter Doherty and Stephen Turner explain in their Q A in this issue of Journal of Biology 1 .