From mass confusion in 1918 to virus detection within hours

WHEN millions of people started dying around the world in 1918, doctors and scientists didn’t have a clue what was happening. As the epidemic spread, it was blamed on everything from tiny plants to dusty books.

Then again, people couldn’t have known otherwise as the influenza virus was only identified in 1933. How times have changed.

Just over a month after people started falling ill in Mexico, experts have identified the culprit to be a novel H1N1 flu virus, which carries genetic material that is mostly swine with the rest being human and avian.

Scientists in Mexico, the US and New Zealand have posted full sequences of its DNA in a public online library.

What this means is scientists everywhere can now use these descriptions to create new tools to fight the virus, such as rapid diagnostic test kits and vaccines.

While the fastest conventional tests take up to two days, scientists are designing highly specific ones that can pick up this virus in four to six hours.

Explaining the “polymerase chain reaction” technique used in the test kit, a scientist with a top government hospital in Asia said: “A well-designed rapid (real time) PCR test should be able to detect specific swine H1N1 virus in a sample by detecting gene sequences that are unique to this virus and no other.”

Mark von Itzstein, director of the Institute for Glycomics (study of sugar molecules in organisms) in Australia’s Griffith University, said: “It will rapidly let us identify if it is swine H1N1, and if it is, we will want to treat the patients within a 48-hour period with Tamiflu, quarantine them and monitor their recovery.”

Hong Kong scientists hope to design a PCR kit by next week. The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention is sending test kits to US states and Mexico but other countries don’t want to wait.

“The genetic sequences have just been made available... many laboratories are rushing to find the best test, it will take one to two weeks (for us to design one), but we need a lot of validation, we need hundreds of specimens to do that,” said microbiologist Yuen Kwokyung at the University of Hong Kong.

The virus is thought to have killed 176 people in Mexico – with 12 confirmed – and spread to at least 10 other countries but most of the cases outside Mexico have been mild.

Nobody knows for sure how this virus came to be. But experts expect to find out more through analysing its samples and tracking its DNA changes over time.

“The current analysis indicates this is mainly a swine virus, but further whole genome sequencing throughout the pandemic period and comparison with previous purely swine viruses will be able to tell us which genes are mutating to allow pig-to-human transmission and then more efficient human-to-human transmission,” said the scientist with the government hospital in Asia.

“If you can sequence full viral genomes at regular [times] during the pandemic, you can see how the pandemic strain is evolving with the human pandemic and which genes are evolving in parallel with new clinical and epidemiological developments.

“For example, say patients now do not get diarrhoea as a routine feature of the current virus strain, but later on, they start to develop diarrhoea – which gene mutation may have lead to this new clinical feature?”