So, um, yeah…

Just like everyone else, I move with the tide of the media in terms of topics. But some topics have a strange draw that keeps me following them, even after the mass media has moved on.

One of the topics that I keep coming back to is Avian Flu. I was involved in some corporate work on this (and a ton of personal research on pandemics) a while back and found it very interesting. I ran into far too many credible experts who seemed to feel that avian flu spreading to humans was a “when” not “if” scenario. Call me morbid, but that’s what keeps me coming back.

Now a team of researchers at MIT have figured out exactly how it’ll happen. They’ve been studying killer flu bugs that spread from birds to humans, including a close variant of the 1918 pandemic virus, and have found that it all comes down to the shape of sugars in the upper respiratory tract. The flu virus connects to the sugars on the surface of the cells and uses them as the entry point for invasion. In order to connect though, the receptors on the virus have to be shaped to attach with the sugar.

Turns out H5N1 (the current scary avian flu variant) is shaped perfectly for bird sugars, which fortunately for us don’t match to the sugars commonly found in our respiratory tracts. The two most likely sugars in our tracts would result in cone and umbrella shaped virus receptors (thus the title of the post).

This new info will allow researchers at disease control centers and universities to do some better observation of virus mutations and to watch for variants which could be becoming human transmissible. That at least gets us a bit earlier warning.