New swine flu virus with pandemic potential discovered in China

New swine flu virus with pandemic potential discovered in China

While the entire world is still fighting the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, a new swine flu type virus with the potential of triggering a pandemic has been discovered in China.

According to a study published on Monday in the US science journal PNAS, the virus named "G4" genetically descended from the H1N1 strain, which caused a pandemic back in 2009.

It contains "all the essential hallmarks of being highly adapted to infect humans," the authors and scientists at Chinese universities and China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention were quoted as saying.

Between 2011 and 2018, analysts took nearly 30,000 nasal swabs from pigs in slaughterhouses across 10 Chinese provinces, providing them to segregate 179 swine flu viruses.

The majority of which were of a new form of virus which has been dominant among pigs since 2016.

The researchers found the G4 to be very infectious, which replicates in human cells and causes more severe symptoms in ferrets than any other virus.

Tests further revealed that any kind of immunity that humans gain from the exposure to seasonal flu does not give any protection from G4.

As per the blood tests, results showed antibodies created by exposure to the G4, 10.4% of the swine workers had already been infected with it.

The tests also revealed that 4.4% of the general population also have been exposed to this virus.

This means the highly contagious G4 virus has already passed on to humans from animals, however, there is still no evidence that it can be passed on from human to human.

"It is of concern that human infection of G4 virus will further human adaptation and increase the risk of a human pandemic," the researchers claimed.

"The work comes as a salutary reminder that we are constantly at risk of new emergence of zoonotic pathogens and that farmed animals, with which humans have greater contact than with wildlife, may act as the source for important pandemic viruses," the head of the department of veterinary medicine at Cambridge University, James Wood said.