World fights new flu virus with latest science

By Tan Ee Lyn

HONG KONG (Reuters) - When millions of people started dying around the world in 1918, doctors and scientists hadn't a clue what was happening. As the epidemic spread, people blamed it on everything from tiny plants to old dusty books.

Then again, they couldn't have known because the influenza virus was only identified in 1933, by a British research team.

But how times have changed.

Just over a month after people started falling ill in Mexico, experts have identified the culprit to be a novel H1N1 flu virus, which carries genetic material that is mostly swine with the rest being human and avian.

Scientists in Mexico, the United States and New Zealand have since posted full sequences of its DNA taken from 34 virus samples in an online public library. And the list is growing.

What this means is scientists everywhere can now use these descriptions to create new tools to fight the virus, such as rapid diagnostic test kits and vaccines.

While the fastest conventional tests take up to two days, scientists are designing highly specific ones that can pick up this swine H1N1 flu virus in four to six hours.

Explaining the "polymerase chain reaction" technique used in the test kit, a scientist with a top government hospital in Asia said: "A well-designed rapid (real time) PCR test should be able to detect specific swine H1N1 virus in a sample by detecting gene sequences that are unique to this virus and no other."