Attack rates are extremely high, but fatality is low and said to be restricted to young children. Starts in Africa, proceedes northward to all of Europe and the Baltic States. The highly pathogenic strain may swap segments with the low-pathogenicity strain and voila – a highly pathogenic strain that can infect people, cue a new pandemic! This also means pigs are a common mixing pot for cases of antigenic shift.Ī highly pathogenic strain that can infect birds but is unable to infect humans may infect an intermediate host, like a pig, at the same time as a low-pathogenicity strain that can infect humans. This is because pigs are the only mammalian species to have both receptor types and are therefore susceptible to and enable productive replication of avian and human influenza viruses in one animal. Pigs are a common intermediate host for influenza strains between humans, who have α2,6 receptors in their respiratory tract, and species such as birds who have α2,3 receptors. Influenza viruses are known to transmit zoonotically as some strains can infect multiple species. Influenza virus surface protein types determine the types of receptors that the virus can interact with, and consequently, the host species which can be infected. Pandemic outbreaks have been recorded through history, the more recent of which have been attributed to specific subtypes (summarized in Table 1). Consequently, pandemics are nearly always a result of antigenic shift events. However, antigenic shift generates novel lineages to which immunity is therefore often very poor across the population. Individuals may have partial immunity, from previous infection or vaccination, to infection with influenza strains that have undergone antigenic drift. What are the consequences of antigenic drift vs antigenic shift? When antigenic shift occurs, it is possible that an H1N1 virus and H3N2 virus may interact to produce an H1N2 virus and an H3 N1 virus, for example.įigure 3: Representation of genome segment re-assortment (antigenic shift) between different strains producing a novel virus. As the primary surface antigens, HA and NA types are incorporated into the naming scheme for Influenza A virus strains (e.g., A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)). Influenza A is responsible for most seasonal and pandemic flu outbreaks in humans. If the segment swapped encodes an influenza antigen (such as HA or NA) which is targeted by the host immune system, this is termed antigenic shift and can radically alter a host immune system’s ability to recognize the virus (Figure 3). Due to its segmented nature, influenza viruses can swap whole sections of their genome. Influenza has a negative sense single stranded RNA genome, encapsulated by nuclear protein, which consists of eight segments (Figure 2). If they have no effect or offer benefits, such as immune evasion, they are likely to persist and may even spread through the population, depending on other associated changes.įigure 2: Structure of the influenza A virus. If the changes reduce virus survival, they will be selected against and lost from the population. Not all genetic mutations will result in antigenic changes depending on 1) their position in the triplet code (non-coding changes) or 2) if the change they produce does not affect the region of the protein recognized by the immune system. Consequently, they will often be surface proteins, like haemagglutinin (HA) or neuraminidase (NA) in the case of the influenza virus.Īntigenic drift is a natural process whereby mutations (mistakes) occur during replication in the genes encoding antigens that produce alterations in the way they appear to the immune system (antigenic changes) (Figure 1). Antigens are molecules that are recognized by the host immune system as foreign and induce an immune response.
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