16
2019
-
12
New study says H10N8 bird flu virus poses little threat to humans
A new study published on the British "Nature" magazine website on the 28th said that although the H10N8 avian influenza virus has the ability to infect humans, this ability is not very powerful, and it has not yet been found to spread among people.
Author:
A new study published on the British "Nature" magazine website on the 28th said that although the H10N8 avian influenza virus has the ability to infect humans, this ability is not very powerful, and it has not yet been found to spread among people.
At the end of last year, the first case of human infection with the H10N8 avian influenza virus was found in Jiangxi Province, China. The medical community has since researched this new type of bird flu virus that can infect humans, and confirmed that it originated from wild birds and infected people with poultry.
Scientists at the National Institutes of Medicine report that in order to understand the potential of the H10N8 avian influenza virus to infect humans, they studied in detail the virus's hemagglutinin, a protein that binds to cell surface receptors on the surface of the virus. After studying its molecular structure and its characteristics of binding to receptors, they found that although the virus can bind to human cell surface receptors and cause infection, this binding ability is only equivalent to its ability to bind to the surface of avian cells. One-fifteenth of the body binding ability. In other words, the virus prefers to infect birds rather than humans.
Further research has found that a mucin exists in the human respiratory tract that clears the virus before it infects cells, which may be one reason why the H10N8 avian influenza virus is less likely to infect humans.
Related news
2019-12-16