Reply #6: K&R! You know the little buggers aren't "smart" but they sure do adapt.

[bluedawg12]

It's like a hot dog.

The hot dog part has the "code" the bun is the capsid. ( stop me if I am making an ass of myself! LOL)

The code, which is the standard format for coding anything, from making proteins to making a gerbil, is called DNA or RNA.

These little buggers can, as I understand it, hack their way through living systems, by stealing code.

Just when a vaccine or anti-viral comes close to stopping them in their tracks, they switch codes, like good hackers, when an antiviral software is developed.

I guess, they are little hotdogs that act like code hackers.

This is evolution in action:

"Here’s where it get pretty amazing – influenza A. This virus has the ability to undergo a kind of gene swapping or genetic reassortment that other viruses do not have. If a host cell is simultaneously infected by two different strains of influenza A, the copies of the virion may contain mixtures of each parents' genes. This makes it very easy for influenza A to quickly evolve into new combinations of genes. This is called antigenic shift; a newly created virus strain with mixed genetic material that’s different from it’s parents."

"I happen to respect viruses a great deal - they are amazing creatures. I ask myself frequently how a one-celled organism dependent on others for survival can be so smart – they always seem to be one step ahead of us.'

Me too. This is one of the reasons that HIV is so hard to "cure," they adapt faster than our strategies for eradicate can be developed.

Once inside the host, part of the problem is the host response, as someone in another thread pointed out, the release of inflammatory chemicals called cytokines creates a terrible inflammation in the lungs. So, while supporting life, while trying anti-viral medications, doctors have to add anti-inflammatory cortico steroids, to balance the exuberant inflammatory response to the virus.

"An influenza pandemic has always been a great global infectious-disease threat. There have been 10 pandemics of influenza A in the past 300 years. A recent analysis showed that the pandemic of 1918 and 1919 killed 50 million to 100 million people,1 and although its severity is often considered anomalous, the pandemic of 1830 through 1832 was similarly severe — it simply occurred when the world's population was smaller. Today, with a world population of 6.5 billion — more than three times that in 1918 — even a relatively "mild" pandemic could kill many millions of people."
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/352/18/1839

........


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H1N1

"H1N1 is a subtype of the species Influenza A virus. The "H" refers to the Hemagglutinin protein, and the "N" refers to the Neuraminidase protein. H1N1 has mutated into various strains including the Spanish Flu strain (now extinct in the wild), mild human flu strains, endemic pig strains, and various strains found in birds. A variant of H1N1 was responsible for the Spanish flu pandemic that killed some 50 million to 100 million people worldwide from 1918 to 1919.<1> A different variant exists in pig populations.

Low pathogenic H1N1 strains still exist in the wild today, causing roughly half of all flu infections in 2006.<2> When the 1918 virus was compared with human flu viruses in 2005, it was noticed that it had alterations in just 25 to 30 of the virus's 4,400 amino acids. These changes were enough to turn a bird virus into a version that was human-transmissible.<3>

In April of 2009, an H1N1 outbreak killed over eighty in Mexico, and was believed to have infected more than 1500 individuals worldwide as of April 26, 2009. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control warned that it was possible the outbreak could develop into a pandemic.<4>"