What Is Bird Flu (H5N1) and How Is It Evolving?
In 1878, Dr. Eduardo Perroncito, an Italian veterinarian who specialized in pathology, noticed something strange: fowl in a few villages had begun to become sick, with symptoms he had never observed before in chickens, turkeys and other birds. The bright red combs on the tops of their heads and the wattles that dangle below their chins took on a purple discoloration, and so did their legs. The birds were having a hard time standing upright, and their appendages were swollen, appetite diminished and egg production low. Some would even drop dead without exhibiting any symptoms at all. He described it as a ‘malattia gravissima’', a most severe disease.
H5N1 virus (gold) seen in epithelial cells (green), taken by transmission electron microscope. Image by Cynthia Goldsmith through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Today, this disease is known as avian influenza, or bird flu, and comes in two strains. H5N1 is the strain with a high pathogenic potential and makes birds visibly sick as described above. However, there is also a less obvious strain, H7N9 , in which birds generally don’t exhibit symptoms, making it hard to tell that they are actually infected. In 2013 the first case of zoonotic avian influenza (the disease spreading to humans) was reported in China. Several hundred people are believed to have died in China due to this outbreak.
How did this bird disease make its way to humans? It’s about evolution. Throughout history, bird flu has been controlled by killing infected birds, with over 150 million birds in killed in efforts to control the disease. But viruses, just like animals and plants, possess genetic variation, meaning that natural selection can act upon them. Viruses also reproduce very quickly, and their rate of mutation is higher than that of plants and animals. Since viruses have many genetic variants, the odds that one of them will carry a useful mutation that natural selection can select favorably (such as surviving in humans), is high.
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One worry comes from how easy it is for viruses to share genetic material. Regular, non-lethal human influenza is easily recognized by our immune systems as a threat and attacked. But because our immune systems have no experience with avian influenza, it won’t know to attack these strains. The avian influenza virus could acquire the genes from our human influenza virus and mix them together in one lethal package. This would result in the virus having a combination of human transmissible genes and the deadly qualities of the avian virus.
Every time avian influenza infects a human, it is another opportunity for the virus to adapt to human hosts by random mutation or acquiring genes from viruses within the host. If a strain of the virus succeeds in human-to-human transmission and reproduces rapidly enough, we might have a pandemic on our hands.
In more recent studies, it has been suggested that the avian influenza virus historically may have swapped genes with an Eurasian strain of the swine influenza virus, which began bird-to-mammal transmissibility. A separate strain of swine influenza proceeded to trade genes with human influenza, which allowed this swine influenza to infect humans. Researchers suggest that these two different forms of swine influenza might have provided the bridge to connect bird flu to humans.
The cases of humans infected by bird flu have gone down in recent years, but the best way to prevent the spread of avian influenza to humans is to reduce interaction with wild and domesticated birds. If you own domesticated birds, keep their quarters clean, and routinely disinfect your footwear and wash your hands. And lastly, receive your annual flu shot.