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medpundit |
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Saturday, March 25, 2006On the upside, the virus doesn't spread easily between people because its natural habitat is deep in the lungs: Scientists say they've found a reason bird flu isn't spreading easily from person to person: The virus concentrates itself too deep in the respiratory tract to be spewed out by coughing and sneezing. ...Ordinary flu viruses spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes, blasting out tiny droplets carrying the germ to others. For that to happen, the virus has to be perched in the right places to be ejected by a cough or sneeze. The new work suggests H5N1, by contrast, infects humans too low in the respiratory tract for that to occur. Both research teams used human tissue removed from various parts of the respiratory tract - the region from the nose to the lung - to study where virus infection occurs. Scientists already knew that bird flu viruses use a specific kind of docking site to enter cells they infect, while human flu viruses use a different one. Kawaoka's group found the bird virus docking site appears mostly on lung cells, while being rare on cells found in higher areas like the nose and windpipe. Those higher areas were dominated instead by the human-type docking site. Presumably, that's why the only people to be infected so far are those who live intimately with poultry. They're more likely to inhale the virus deeply (think dried chicken droppings.) posted by Sydney on 3/25/2006 11:29:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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