ViroBlogy

Dr Yoshihiro Kawaoka, professor of virology at University of Wisconsin at Madison, has tweaked the 2009 strain of pandemic influenza to make it resistant the human immune system’s antibodies.

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Trust the Dimwitted Mail to misstate what happened – which is that Yoshihiro Kawaoka selected the H1N1pdm 2009 flu virus in culture till he came up with antibody-binding escape mutants.

What he said:

‘Through selection of immune escape viruses in the laboratory under appropriate containment conditions, we were able to identify the key regions [that] would enable 2009 H1N1 viruses to escape immunity,’

Now recall that the H1N1pdm 2009 virus is NOT a particularly nasty variant; that it has NOT been proved the escape mutants will infect vaccinated people at all – and that all the work was done "a state-of-the-art laboratory at the Institute for Influenza Virus Research in Madison", so the odds that it will get out are VERY low.

But papers have been sold, and the scare is in.

This entry was posted on 2 July, 2014 at 10:55 and is filed under biotechnology, Evolution, Influenza viruses, Scoop.it, Vaccines: General, Viruses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.