Even though two new influenza strains have caused infections in China and Taiwan, researchers from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., have found the strains do not yet easily infect humans.
Researchers analyzed a key protein from the two bird flu viruses, variants of subtypes H10N8 and H6N1. They found the strains haven't acquired the changes necessary that would allow them to infect humans easily and cause a pandemic.
However, that does not mean the world is safe from a bird flu pandemic, warned Ian A. Wilson, PhD, a professor and chair of TSRI's Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology. "These bird flu viruses seem able to bind to receptors on host cells in different ways and thus can probably mutate in different ways to jump to humans — so we shouldn't be complacent in our ability to predict the viral changes required to get a pandemic," he said.
The research is presented in two papers in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.