BIO NEWS FROM MEXICO. Ferguson

TEN TIMES MORE INFLUENZA CARRIERS: SCIENCE 

MEXICO CITY.-  Latest reports estimate in 6,497 confirmed porcine influenza A-H1N1 virus cases all around the world, and a research team said virus bearers toll could be ten times higher than ill people, so there were as 23,000 carriers here by the end of april.

 Dr. Neil Ferguson,  a mathematical biologist at the Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College London, has published in Science magazine their calculus about the present influenza A pandemia, and says disease is fatal only in four cases between a thousand.

 

The pandemia has the same behavior than the 1957, but world is better prepared, says the article. Conclude consistently that the outbreak begans February 15 (in La Gloria, Perote, Veracruz), and there could be as less as 6,000 infected persons and as high as 32,000 at the end of april.

 The course of disease looks like a seasonal influenza with 1.2 or 1.6 secoundary cases by each case, and discard the

20 or 30 percent of global population infected fears of a worst pandemia scenario. At this point has an expected spread.

  "Our study shows that this virus is spreading just as we would expect for the early stages of a flu pandemic. So far, it has been following a very similar pattern to the flu pandemic in 1957, in terms of the proportion of people who are becoming infected and the percentage of potentially fatal cases that we are seeing”, said Ferguson.

 By the way, some signs of a new mutation in the humane influenza virus are worrying specialists. The drift is the process in which influenza virus undergoes mutation. The amount of change can be subtle or dramatic, but eventually as drift occurs, a new variant strain will become dominant. This process allows influenza viruses to change and re-infect people repeatedly through their lifetime and is the reason influenza virus strains in vaccine must be updated each year.