Here’s the story:
I hope the last sentence is correct:
Normally I’d say the whole thing was a rare oddity, and generally NBD.
But all the signs around us point to Mother Nature being royally pissed off, so … keep those masks handy and go buy some toilet paper.
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(Kidding about that last part. Mostly)
What’s the big deal? They find new strains of influenza in people nearly every year, and publish articles just like this. It doesn’t really mean anything other than most new strains of flu seem to come out of China.
There are new strains of existing H/N antigen subtypes every year because of the mutability of the Influenza A virus. This is a novel subtype in humans, the transmissibility and virulence of which are unknown, so it is naturally of interest because while the initial spillover is unlikely to be highly transmissible it could evolve or exchange genes with another well-adapted subtype and quickly become a new threat. Of course, this possibility exists with any of the five current human-adapted avian Inf-A subtypes (H5N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2), and H5N1 is the subtype widely viewed as being most likely to spur an epidemic.
These news services are picking up on the story out of sensationalism of another potential pandemic without context for sure, but is not true that “…most new strains of flu seem to come out of China,” by any more than in proportion with its population. China has a lot of intensive animal agriculture to supply the desire for chicken in particular (and some cultural food handling practices that increase the likelihood of bacterial transmission, and the live animal markets that are common all throughout Southeast Asia) but every industrialized nation has large, intensive animal farming concerns. There is currently an worldwide H5N8 outbreak going on that was first identified in birds in Saudi Arabia and human infection found in Russia in February 2021.
Epidemiologists have long warned of a coming pandemic, and their chief suspect was and remains an avian flu subtype (and in particular H5N1 or H7N9). Almost everybody missed on guessing that the next global epidemic would be a betacoronavirus because neither SARS-CoV(-1) or MERS-CoV was all that transmissible, but there are a wide variety of viral families that, should they become more transmissible and/virulent, could make the current COVID-19 pandemic look like a minor irritation in comparison. A novel Orthopoxvirus or highly transmissible hemorrhagic fever could have an IFR of upwards of 20%, and in the era of common international jet travel could spread faster than contact tracing and isolation could confine it. We really need better international cooperation on surveillance and reporting, as well as being prepared to respond to such outbreaks because they are coming even if H10N3 isn’t one of them.
Stranger