Director of China’s National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, Chen Hualan, has disclosed on Wednesday in the U.S. journal proceedings of the National Academy of Science that the EAH1N1 was likely to cause the next human flu pandemic, and great importance must be attached to it.
Hualan, the head of the research team, added that insufficient vaccines are available and most humans have no antibodies to defend against the highly transferable Eurasian avian strain of the H1N1 virus.
The research further disclosed that a variant posed the highest pandemic threat among 228 flu viruses identified in 36,417 pigs at farms and slaughterhouses in 10 provinces from August 2010 to March 2013, A study by Chinese researchers on Wednesday in Beijing has found a common strain of swine flu in Chinese pigs and poses a serious threat that demands “immediate action” to prevent a global pandemic.
Hualan further educates in the journal that after sequencing the genome from 139 strains, two distinct antigenic groups were found to spread efficiently to humans, stressing that children, adults and the elderly have no antibodies at all to resist one of the two EAH1N1 strains they found.
He also pointed out that the current human flu vaccines and the pre-existing immunity in the human population cannot offer enough protection against the viruses, adding that the study proved the potential of EAH1N1 to infect humans and immediate action is needed to prevent the efficient transmission of EAH1N1 SIVs to humans.
Hualan noted that a Lancet study 2009 H1N1 virus epidemic killed between 151,700 and 575,400 people.