![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Influenza explained for gearheads
May. 2nd, 2009 08:37 amI've seen a number of weird postings this week about how swine flu can't be natural, because it's a hellacious three-way mutant, and how if it can mutate this far, what's to stop it mutating farther and combining with, say, Marburg to make something that makes you sneeze your intestines out of your ass?
Every species has its trick. For humans, it's our big brains and technology; for tigers it's claws and stripes; for ants it's cooperation. For flu viruses, it's mutation. Mutation in flu is no weirder than ants marching in line or tigers ripping up some delicious tender prey. It's just what they do.
Whenever you get a bunch of flu virus in an infested host, it's kinda like a VW swapmeet. You've got a bunch of guys all eager to share and trade bits of their Volkswagens. Now, in a single infection - say, the Beetle owners' swapmeet - they're just swapping stuff they swap all the time, and nothing interesting happens. This is ordinary influenza mutation. It produces minor variations that you can still recognize as Beetles.
But if you get a group of Camper drivers come to the show, they can play around too, more stuff gets swapped and some damn weird combinations can happen. That's gearheads for you. Now you've got something novel and weird-looking, but it's still just Volkswagen gearheads swapping bits of their VWs the way they usually do. This is the novel, cross-species flu that we've never seen before.
In this crude model, the big all-model swapmeet is probably an intensive pork farm; Beetles are regular human flu, Campers are swine flu, and for good measure, the Karmann Ghia guys in the corner are bird flu. They're all air-cooled flat-fours. That definition, "air-cooled flat-four" -- that's the species influenza.
But these are pure Volkswagen gearheads. Turn up at the meet on a motorcycle, even a real beauty from the Marburg & Ebola Company, and they're just not interested: the parts don't fit, the wrenches don't work, sorry, dude, not our thing.
Every species has its trick. For humans, it's our big brains and technology; for tigers it's claws and stripes; for ants it's cooperation. For flu viruses, it's mutation. Mutation in flu is no weirder than ants marching in line or tigers ripping up some delicious tender prey. It's just what they do.
Whenever you get a bunch of flu virus in an infested host, it's kinda like a VW swapmeet. You've got a bunch of guys all eager to share and trade bits of their Volkswagens. Now, in a single infection - say, the Beetle owners' swapmeet - they're just swapping stuff they swap all the time, and nothing interesting happens. This is ordinary influenza mutation. It produces minor variations that you can still recognize as Beetles.
But if you get a group of Camper drivers come to the show, they can play around too, more stuff gets swapped and some damn weird combinations can happen. That's gearheads for you. Now you've got something novel and weird-looking, but it's still just Volkswagen gearheads swapping bits of their VWs the way they usually do. This is the novel, cross-species flu that we've never seen before.
In this crude model, the big all-model swapmeet is probably an intensive pork farm; Beetles are regular human flu, Campers are swine flu, and for good measure, the Karmann Ghia guys in the corner are bird flu. They're all air-cooled flat-fours. That definition, "air-cooled flat-four" -- that's the species influenza.
But these are pure Volkswagen gearheads. Turn up at the meet on a motorcycle, even a real beauty from the Marburg & Ebola Company, and they're just not interested: the parts don't fit, the wrenches don't work, sorry, dude, not our thing.
