Threat of deadly flu pandemic still remains

Bird flu is still the most likely candidate to evolve into a deadly human pandemic, a Kiwi scientist at the forefront of global flu research says.

Richard Webby, who is based at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, was in Wellington yesterday to speak about new strains of influenza with the potential to spread from animals to humans.

Although the global H1N1 – or swine flu – pandemic had diminished since its 2009 peak, the risks of animal influenza strains had not diminished ‘‘one iota’’.

‘‘In the past 12 months alone we have seen multiple confirmed human infections from three new animal influenza viruses; two from birds and one from pigs.’’

The H1N1 strain had been transmitted back to pigs and mutated again, he said. The real risk came from new flu strains that mutated into a form that could be transmitted from human to human. However, it was difficult to predict how dangerous individual strains would be in humans, Dr Webby said.

Researchers ‘‘didn’t do so well’’ with H1N1, which spread rapidly but was nowhere near as deadly as first expected.

‘‘The most concern still lies with these H5N1 viruses – the bird flu – because of the capacity of them to cause disease. It tends to be very, very lethal.’’

Of the nearly 600 humans who have had confirmed bird flu since 2003, 60 per cent died of the illness,dr Webby also warned that New Zealand’s geographical isolation would not be enough to protect the population from a global flu pandemic.