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Flu Viruses. Transcript PDF
Flu Viruses. Transcript PDF
Chris - Okay, Les. Very good question and very topical too because
we’re expecting flu to arrive in the UK at any moment. There are lots
and people out there scrutinising what's coming in to testing
laboratories all over the country to start logging the arrival of the
virus and then tracking where it goes. And the fact is that flu is an
infection of humans and that to infect someone, you have to come
into contact with a virus that a person has made.
We know where flu comes from. It comes originally from birds and
specifically aquatic birds. They infect humans but also other animals
like pigs and periodically, humans infect a pig with a strain of human
flu, a bird infects a pig with a strain of bird flu, the pig mixes the two
together and you produce a new strain, a pandemic strain, that
comes back out of the pig, and it goes back into the people.
We don't think that flu comes from space. There are some people
who do think that but we don't think that that's true. We have pretty
good idea as to how it spreads, but we certainly have to keep our eye
on modern transport because it’s a big worry. Because if we aren’t
very vigilant and we don't watch what people have and where they go
with it, and what animals have and where they go with it, then as the
population increases, we’re going to see more and more risks in this
kind of thing happening. You just have to look at what happened
with SARS in 2003. That got thousands and thousands of people,
8,000 people in a very short time. At a time when the world was
gearing up for weapons of mass destruction release because we
thought Saddam Hussein was going to unleash weapons of mass
destruction of an infectious nature on the world, and luckily he
didn’t. But the whole world was prime for that to happen and SARS
still ripped through all of that without too much trouble. But it’s a
really interesting question and thank you for that