You are going to nationalgeographic.com/tv and different terms of use and privacy policy will apply.
The swine flu pandemic is well under way. With the WHO citing almost 60,000 laboratory-confirmed cases at the time of writing, the race is truly on to understand more about the virus. Now, two new studies have painted a fresh but partly contradictory picture about two of the virus’s most important aspects – its infectivity (its ability to spread from host to host) and its virulence (its ability to cause disease in a host). These two traits will largely determine the threat that the virus poses, especially in relation to more familiar garden varieties of seasonal flu.
Both groups, one based in the US and the other in the Netherlands, tested the virus’s behaviour in ferrets. These animals are affected by flu viruses in much the same way as humans, mimicking both the severity of our infections and ease of our viral transmission.
Both studies found that the new swine flu virus takes a slightly greater toll on its host’s health than the usual strains of seasonal flu. These strains limit their infections to a ferret’s nasal passages but the...
Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society.
Copyright © 2015-2021 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved