Chinese scientists have discovered a strain of swine flu virus in China with all the characteristics capable of causing a future pandemic, according to a study published Monday in the American scientific journal PNAS.
Experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences are studying swine flu outbreaks in pig farms across the country and say the latest strain can be transmitted to humans, although only two people are confirmed to have caught it the virus, dubbed G4 EA H1N1, since the first outbreak in 2016.
Researchers who say the disease is “highly adapted” to infect humans are now calling for surveillance of farms and people working on or near them, as further transmission could lead to “adaptation and pandemic” of the virus.
The two cases of EA H1N1 type G4 viruses were in a 46-year-old and a 9-year-old.
“An epidemiological investigation revealed that both patients had neighbors who raised pigs, which suggests that the G4 EA virus could be transmitted from pigs to humans and lead to serious infection and even death.”
During testing for the virus in ferrets, they found that symptoms such as fever, sneezing, wheezing and coughing were all common.
George Gao, Jinhua Liu and colleagues isolated 179 viruses from pigs in 10 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2018 to study the risks they pose to humans and found that since 2016, the majority of viruses found in pigs livestock exhibited the characteristics you would expect from a population during a pandemic.
According to scientists, out of 300 samples taken from pig farmers at 15 different pig breeding centers, only 10.4% had antibodies against this strain of the virus.
This means that the virus presents a particularly high chance of spreading a pandemic according to scientists.
“All of this evidence indicates that the G4 EA H1N1 virus is a growing problem in pig farms, and the widespread spread of G4 viruses in pigs inevitably increases their exposure to humans,” the study authors wrote in their article. .
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