Swine Flu: Don’t Blame Miss Piggy
Swine Flu: Don’t Blame Miss Piggy
Pity the poor piglet. The otherwise under estimable mammal has never had a very good rep, except at the BBQ pits. There is just something about the mud, the snout, the oink, the curly tail and being a scavenger. Now enters the flu…
The swine flu outbreak that has sparked worldwide fear. So much fear that Egypt has ordered the slaughter of the country’s 300,000 pigs, even though no cases have been reported there. Know I know how boys felt back in the days of Moses.
Itis easy to pin on the eponymous animal from which it emerged, the pig pen…but the fact is, the current epidemic is no more than an accident of evolution. If pigs are to blame, so too are birds and humans. Remember the bird flu?
The real problem begins with the wily nature of the influenza virus itself. Made up of only ten proteins, it is an uncomplicated thing. Assembled into a genome that’s simple even by microbiological standards…but the genome is unusually flexible, with snap-in, snap-out gene segments that allow easy mutation and exchange of information with other viruses.
Hence the reason we need a new flu vaccine every year. By the time one flu season has ended and the next one begins, the virus has mutated so much, it can simply survive last year’s shot. Compare that with, say, polio, now the polio vaccine was perfected in 1955 and hasn’t had to change much since.
For the full story, go to “Swine Flu: Don’t Blame Miss Piggy,” go to Time Magazine.
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