- Influenza activity remained low, but is increasing across the region.
- The proportion of virus detections among sentinel surveillance specimens increased to 28%.
- The majority of influenza viruses detected for this week was A(H3N2).
- Laboratory-confirmed influenza cases from hospital settings increased in some countries.
Flu News Europe
As a reminder, see this:
ReplyDeleteEditor's summary: Five antigenic sites in the virus surface hemagglutinin protein, which together comprise 131 amino acid positions, are thought to determine the full scope of antigenic drift of influenza A virus. Koel et al. (p. 976) show that major antigenic change can be caused by single amino acid substitutions. These single substitutions substantially skew the way the immune system “sees” the virus. All substitutions of importance are located next to the receptor-binding site in the hemagglutinin. Because there are few positions of importance for antigenic drift, there are strict biophysical limitations to the substitutions at these positions, which restricts the number of new antigenic drift variants at any point in time. Thus, the evolution of influenza virus may be more predictable than previously thought.
http://comments.sciencemag.org/content/10.1126/science.1244730
Each time you see someone claim that viruses "evolve" try to find out why they think the theft of quantized energy can be linked from mutations to human evolution via natural selection. You will then learn that the researchers making the ridiculous claim do not know the difference between a mutation and an energy-dependent amino acid substitution linked to the supercoiled DNA that protects all organized genomes from virus-driven entropy.