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Navy Researchers Helped Spot Swine Flu in US

hypocritexposer

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Behind the Scenes: Navy Researchers Helped Spot Swine Flu in the United States

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA—Late on the afternoon of 16 April, 5 days before the public first learned about the current outbreak of swine flu, Michele Ginsberg received word from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that a 10-year-old boy in San Diego County had tested positive for the rare infection. “I thought this could be the big one, honestly,” says Ginsberg, chief of community epidemiology for the San Diego County Health & Human Services Agency. By “big one,” Ginsberg meant the long-anticipated arrival of a new strain of influenza that humans had not seen before and could completely overwhelm the immune system, vaccinated or not.

Ginsberg says the first two cases that surfaced easily could have been missed, but novel research projects under way in the San Diego area, both connected to the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) here, determined that something unusual was afoot. NHRC has developed sophisticated tests for influenza that can sort out whether the virus is strain A or B and then the specific subtype based on two proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, on the viral surface. “In the usual setting, they would have done a rapid test and found that they were both positive for influenza A, and that’s as far as it would have gone,” says Ginsberg. But the new tests couldn't identify the specific subtype, so the Navy forwarded the samples to CDC.

NHRC has received little attention for its critical role in uncovering the U.S. outbreak with what’s known as an H1N1 influenza A virus, so ScienceInsider asked for a detailed explanation of its influenza program and how these two cases came its way.

Answers after the jump.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/04/behind-the-scen.html
 
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