http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/01/21/1303872.htm

Bird flu mutates

(New Scientist Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)THE bird flu virus spreading through Turkey could be accumulating mutations that are helping it adapt to humans. But fears of an imminent pandemic may be premature, as the virus is showing none of the mutations' feared effects.

 

Samples of the H5N1 virus that killed Turkish teenagers Fatma and Mehmet Ali Kocyigit early this month have now been sequenced at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Some of Mehmet's virus had a mutation in a surface protein called haemagglutinin, which makes it better at binding to cells in the human respiratory tract as well as to cells in birds.

While this is worrying, it is not clear whether that mutation alone is enough to make the virus any better at spreading among humans than before. "We'll know it means something if we see it in a cluster of human cases," says Michael Perdue of the World Health Organization. A cluster could mean the mutation is being selected for by being transmitted from human to human.

Mehmet's virus also carried a mutation in the polymerase gene that has been shown to make it more lethal to mice. But if anything the cases in Turkey have been milder than those elsewhere.

What now seems undeniable is that wild birds spread H5N1 from central Asia to Turkey. The virus taken from the teenagers is most closely related to a distinctive strain that was found in wild geese and ducks at Qinghai Lake in China in the spring of 2005 and has since crossed Russia and circled the Black Sea.

This article takes you back and forth. yes it is.... but it is not. They say its mutated more easily for human then say the edimology is more toward if you hang out with birds or something and not a threat, ........just something to watch.  Double talk down at the bottom..confusing.

Bird flu virus mutations found in Turkish sample

The World Health Organization is monitoring the situation, but a spokeswoman said it is too early to know whether the virus is changing in ways that would signal the start of a human flu pandemic.

"It's one isolate from a single virus from Turkey," WHO's Maria Cheng said in Geneva. One mutation found "suggests the virus might be more inclined to bind to human cells rather than animal cells," Cheng said, but there's no evidence that it's becoming more infectious.

"If we started to see a lot more samples from Turkey with this mutation and saw the virus changing, we'd be more concerned," she said.

The Nature report cites a second mutation that also "signals adaptation to humans."

Flu viruses mutate all the time, Cheng said. "For us to assign public health significance to a genetic change we need to match it to what is happening epidemiologically — how the virus is behaving — and clinically — if it's more or less virulent," Cheng said.

The avian flu first was detected in poultry flocks in Turkey in October. Then, on Jan. 5, the Turkish Ministry of Health reported that two teenagers, a brother and sister, had died from the disease, the first human cases outside East Asia.

Unlike in other countries, where cases were scattered geographically and the fatality rate was more than 50%, in Turkey, families have been affected, and there are more reports of people with mild symptoms. In addition to Turkey's 21 cases and four deaths, WHO has reported 145 cases and 78 deaths in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

"When this outbreak (in Turkey) was first reported, there was a lot of concern it was behaving differently," Cheng said.

That doesn't appear to be the case so far, Cheng said. "The team there told us that after two weeks of investigating, they haven't found substantial differences in the pattern we've seen in Southeast Asia."

She said the rapid increase of cases in a rural community in eastern Turkey is probably because of the practice of bringing poultry inside homes to protect them during cold weather, which would increase human exposure to infected chickens.

The mutations, which were detected by scientists at a lab in London, may "signify the virus is trying different things to see if it can more easily infect humans," Cheng said. "So far, we haven't seen that the virus has the ability to do this. But it's important that we continue monitoring."

The H5N1 strain first infected humans in 1997 in Hong Kong. It re-emerged in 2003, and efforts to stamp it out have failed. Health officials have seen no evidence yet that the virus can spread easily in humans.

"We would be concerned if we were seeing successive generations of spread of the virus" in Turkey, Cheng said. "We haven't so far. All these people had a very clear history of contact with diseased birds."

if (((new String(navigator.type))==4)&&((new String(navigator.version)).indexOf("4.")!=-1)){ //se tTimeout necessary for Netscape4 to render button window.setTimeout("MM_showHideLayers('rightsL inkNSlyr','','show');", 500); } else { eval(document.getElementById("rightsLinkButton").in nerHTML = ''); } function RightslinkPopUp(){ var url = "https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet"; var location = url + "?publisherName=" + escape( "USATODAY" ) // required, hard-coded + "&publication=" + escape( "USATODAY" ) // required, hard-coded + "&title=" + escape( "Bird flu mutations found " ) // required + "&publicationDate=" + escape( "01/22/2006") // required + "&author=" + escape( "By Anita Manning, USA TODAY" ) + "&contentID=" + escape( "http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-01-22-bird-flu-mut ations_x.htm" ) // required + "&orderBeanReset=true"; // required, hard-coded PopUp = window.open( location, "Rightslink", "toolbar=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=y es,resizable=yes,width=650,height=550"); }

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-01-22-bird-flu-muta tions_x.htm