Swine Flu recombined with HIV

Had not heard this mentioned yet. Appologize if it has been.

"Health authorities are particularly worried that the capability to mutate already exhibited by the virus could eventually let it combine with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS."

http://www.upi.com/news/issueoftheday/20...43071241461493/

I'm sure that some "Lifecaps" vitamins will take care of that problem if it should occur...;^)

JohnE

What??? That sounds really off-the-wall to me. I read the article but my first reaction is that maybe the reporter misheard something. I have never heard of the possibility of flu and HIV recombining.

I wonder if maybe what was actually being said was related to a possible scenario where regions with large numbers of HIV/AIDS patients, like Africa, could see very high mortality numbers because they are particularly susceptible to a novel flu bug. I'll have to wait for more press articles to confirm this statement.

Swine Flu could combine with leprosy.

Leprosy could combine with malaria.

Malaria could combine with leptospirosis.

Leptospirosis could combine with althlete's foot.

So, what's going in in D.C. that we aren't paying attention to?

You haven't been down to Donald Rumsfeld's potting shed recently have you?

Let's see ... Combine swine flue, bird flu, Ebola, Necrotizing fasciitis, and yellow fever ... we could get a disease that lives in birds, is transmitted by mosquitoes and human to human contact, the first symptom is when your eyes begin to bleed and then you get diarrhea and a debilitating fever, your skin dissolves. Then cough up a lung and die of pneumonia.

It is interesting game to dream up a combination but, seeing as that all of these diseases have been around in some form for thousands of years and they haven't recombined yet tells me that the odds are low. The worrying aspect of this is that humans are invading environments that we haven't had much experience and getting exposed to diseases which were once isolated to small populations of animals in remote locations.

HIV is thought to have originated as a virus that had adapted to monkeys and was benign withing that population. That war, and famine drove populations to go deeper into the forests to hunt monkeys for meat. That during skinning or processing the infected monkey blood got into an open wound. That this got into the local human population where it spread.

The combination of pressures for scarce resources forcing people into remote locations as the human population grows and our use of rapid world-wide travel combine to dig up previously unknown diseases and rapidly stir them into the pot.

As I understand it exchange of genetic information between diseases is possible but fairly rare. The much more common event is exchange between strains of rapidly resorting diseases. Influenza has one of the fastest resort rate of any disease. It routinely changes every few months and exchanges information between strains as a matter of course.

The good news is that these modifications are not directed. They are a random process. The latest swine flu looks to be a result of recent interactions of two strains of swine flu and this is very communicable but not very deadly.

The bad news is that if this swine flu recombines with the existing, and still present bird flu, and the random recombination results in a virus that is as communicable as the present swine flu and as deadly as the existing bird flu, which kills about half of the people who get it, we could be in for a rough time. Being a random process this may never happen. Or it may have happened yesterday.

In the end everyone dies.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39236

The bright spot is that even give everything going wrong the human race is not going to be wiped out. Because, like the various diseases, our immune defense systems are adapting, learning.

That's what I've been wondering ever since the hype started about this flu bug.

I think my hunch was correct. I think a reporter read a WHO document and misinterpreted what it says. I couldn't really find any more articles mentioning that possibility, which is a tip off. This other article pointed me to the apparent source of the flu + HIV mutating idea. Then I went and found the original WHO document here .

There's one sentence in the short document that apparently led to this surprising news report:

"Although there are inadequate data to predict the impact of a possible human influenza pandemic on HIV-affected populations, interactions between HIV/AIDS and A(H1N1) influenza could be significant."

However, "interaction" in this context is not referring to flu and HIV mixing genetically, creating some new super virus. It is simply referring (if you read the whole document, it's quite clear) to the possible additional complications of HIV-infected people also getting infected with the H1N1 flu and being more susceptible because of their weakened immune systems.

Anyway, that's my take on it.

There is a nice article in the April 2009 article of Scientific American about predicting the next pandemic. I had previously posted to the other flu thread about the 6 phases of a pandemic. This one does a similar thing but makes it a little clearer that the CDC site.

(summarized)
Stage 5 - exists in both animals and humans. Can progress through multiple "generation" of victims in both animals and humans.

Stage 6. "Pathogen has become exclusive to humans."

The article also refers to the HIV virus as being at a "pandemic state".

Wolfe, Nathan (2009). Preventing the Next Pandemic. Scientific American, 300-4. pg. 76 - 81.

Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the material on this so maybe my questions are just plain ignorance.

Why is the term "recombined" being used? Were swine flu and HIV combined at some point in the past?

Well, "swine flu" has already combined with "lazy reporter syndrome" and the results are pretty devastating.

The resulting scourge of zombies with great hair was able to flash around the world at nearly the speed of light, infecting billions with fear and dread. Not to mention a craving for bottled water and N95 masks.

I may have to kill my television (i.e., make a dead thing deader).

Ah, I hadn't thought of the word that way. It isn't re-combined, as in "combined again". HIV and the flu were not the same virus in the past.

It's a genetics term and refers to a kind of mutation. When the flu virus is copying itself in the presence of a different virus that is copying itself, some of those genetic building blocks can get mixed together (this is the recombination part) so the final product is a new combination of genes. A new strain has just been created with potentially different characteristics.

The influenza virus is particularly adept at this. It's one reason why the composition of the annual flu shot needs to be tweaked all the time. This propensity for recombination is also why health authorities want to try and minimize the spread of this H1N1, even though it seems to only produce a mild case of the flu.

Many think that things have been overkill so far, but this process of recombination could allow this mild flu virus to suddenly pick up some lethality. The more people that it infects, the greater the chance that this person has another infection that H1N1 could recombine with. So you end up with a new strain that not only spreads like a seasonal flu, but now is much more lethal. Or even a strain that is much more infectious could do a lot of damage due to the sheer numbers of people infected. That scenario is what still keeps health authorities up at night thinking about H1N1.

"Why are authorities worried about this mild new strain but aren't as worried about the regular flu?" you might ask. The seasonal flu is almost always just a variation of strains that we humans have been exposed to year after year, so we tend to build up natural immunity to it over time and we have an idea of what the virus is capable of. It would take a radical mutation to really surprise us with the seasonal flu, although technically, that's possible, too.

This H1N1 strain is completely new to us to start with, so no one knew if it would produce a mild disease or whether it would tear through the population because we don't already have any immunity to it. The number of suspected deaths in Mexico in the beginning of the epidemic put everyone on high alert. We lucked out so far with H1N1.

Thanks for the clarification on terminology, Arney, and for the explanation of why this flu strain has caused such a stir.

Recombined as in Recombinant?
Recombinant virus

Recombinant DNA

Retrovirus

I knew I had hear recombinant before and related to retroviruses. Retroviruses insert their DNA into the host organism (a la HIV-1). There is evidence that the human genome contains DNA from ancient viruses. I think it's still a work in progress, and nothing definitive as for a theory that intersects with evolution.

If I can find the article, I'll post the info.

Well, I've only been able to find one other article today that mentions this HIV + flu turning into a super virus idea, and that article seems to refer back to that original UPI article as a source. That lack of wider coverage probably means this first UPI article was a mistake.

Actually, it's rather annoying. This is the article and when you read it, it seems to imply that the head of the WHO, Dr. Margaret Chan, is afraid of the flu and HIV mixing genetically in an interview with the Financial Times. Financial Times? That's a serious newspaper, and the head of the WHO is a serious position, so it must be true, right? In this article, you see this:

"Disease experts are especially concerned that the ability to mutate seen so far in the virus could eventually see it combine with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS."

However, the only interviews with Dr. Chan that I could find at the Financial Times website are either this or this , and in neither article does she mention this idea. Finally, I noticed at the bottom of the article that the UPI article is a source, so this reporter apparently just got the idea from there.

So, I think we can officially put this one to rest.

For those of us needing to brush up on how viruses work, here is an extremely helpful blog put out by Dr. Racaniello, a microbiology professor at Columbia University:

http://www.virology.ws/

Both HIV (and other retroviruses) and influenza viruses have been around long enough, so if recombination were possible, it would have occurred long before now.

Pete

I'm no expert, but I think that Flu and HIV are probably too dissimilar genetically to even combine, let alone produce an effective offspring. I think as stated above, this is likely bad reporting or worse yet, intentionally bad reporting.

But, there is fear that it could combine with other influenza viruses: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/05/exclusive-meet.html

And I'm fairly sure that's a legit source.

Exactly.

Pete

Just an FYI. UPI is now owned by News World Communications which in turn is owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church

In the same way, you sometimes hear of people being treated for the flu with antibiotics. The antibiotics won't affect the flu, of course, because it's a virus not a bacteria, but it might be helpful against other, opportunistic infections that take advantage of the body's weakened stated.