The New Yorker once called virologist Nathan Wolfe "the world's most prominent virus hunter." Wolfe, the director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, spends his days tracking emerging infectious diseases before they turn into deadly pandemics.
In The Viral Storm, Wolfe describes how most of those emerging infectious diseases originally start out in animals before making the jump to us.
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Avian Flu
Wolfe also recently traveled to Asia, where the first cases of the H5N1 flu were spotted several years ago. H5N1 has killed hundreds of people around the world since it reemerged in 2003.
The original strain of H5N1, explains Wolfe, jumped directly from birds to humans. Other viruses, meanwhile, make the leap to domestic animals before infecting humans; that mixing can then introduce deadlier strains of unknown viruses into the world.
"So what happens is you have a particular pig out there and it could get infected with two different viruses — maybe one that's been in human and one that's been in the original reservoir of a bird — and they can mix and match their genes and create mosaic daughter viruses that will have completely novel properties," he says.
That's where things can get particularly deadly. Wolfe says he thinks of viruses as having two dials: one for how transmissible they are and one for how deadly they are. The H1N1 virus, which spread to over 200 countries in 2009 and 2010, is considered to be extremely transmissible — but not extremely deadly. Meanwhile a different strain of bird flu — the H5N1 — is incredibly deadly but didn't spread as effectively as the H1N1 strain. Wolfe's team tracked people who had H1N1 but he says they were more interested in people with the deadlier strain.
"And the reason why was because we were really scared that these H5 and H1 viruses would come together in a particular human or pig and create one [virus] that was off the [transmissible and deadly] dials," he says. "And that's of course the devastating pandemic we're trying to avoid."
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