Chinese scientists warned that pigs are a ‘key intermediate host’ or ‘mixing vessel’ for viruses spreading from wild animals into people and will trigger one other pandemic if not taken critically.
Experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences studying outbreaks of swine flu in pig farms throughout the nation and say the newest strain can cross to people even though only two people are confirmed to have caught the virus, dubbed G4 EA H1N1, since the first outbreak in 2016.
The researchers who say the disease is ‘highly adapted’ to infect people are actually calling for monitoring of farms and people working on or close to them as further transmission could cause the virus to ‘adapt and become a pandemic’.
The two cases of a G4-like EA H1N1 virus have been of a 46-year-old and a 9-year-old.’ Epidemiological survey discovered that the two patients had neighbours who reared pigs, suggesting that G4 EA virus may transmit from swine to human, and result in extreme infection and even death.’
During tests of the virus in ferrets they discovered symptoms resembling fever, sneezing, wheezing, and coughing were all common. George Gao, Jinhua Liu, and colleagues isolated 179 viruses from pigs across 10 provinces in China from 2011 to 2018 to study the risks they pose to people and found that since 2016 the vast majority of viruses present in farmed pigs exhibited features you’d expect from the populace during a pandemic.
In accordance with the scientists, out of 300 samples taken from pig farmers on 15 totally different pig farms, only 10.4 per cent had antibodies against this strain of the virus.
This means the virus poses a very strong chance of pandemic spread based on the scientists.’
All of this proof signifies that G4 EA H1N1 virus is a growing problem in pig farms, and the widespread circulation of G4 viruses in pigs inevitably will increase their exposure to humans,’ study authors wrote in their paper.
