New Virus With Pandemic Potential Found In China

Chinese scientists have cautioned that if not taken seriously, pigs could cause another pandemic as a strain of swine flu which could spread to humans.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have been researching swine flu outbreaks in pig farms around the country and according to them, the new strain can be passed on to people.

Since the first outbreak in 2016 two people are known to have contracted the virus, called G4 EA H1N1 (which was transmitted from pigs).

The two cases of an EA H1N1 virus similar to the G4 were a 46-year-old and a 9-year-old.

The planet is already fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and it will be a major blow to another pandemic.

The disease is ‘highly adapted’ to infect humans, according to researchers, and farms need to be monitored closes before the virus ‘adapts and becomes a pandemic.’

‘Epidemiological survey found that the two patients had neighbors rearing pigs, indicating that G4 EA virus could spread from swine to human, leading to severe infection and even death.’

Symptoms such as fever, sneezing, wheeezing, and coughing were all normal during ferret virus tests.

From 2011 to 2018, George Gao, Jinhua Liu, and colleagues isolated 179 pig viruses across 10 provinces in China to research the risks they present to humans, and found that since 2016, most of the viruses detected in farmed pigs exhibited features that you would expect from the population during a pandemic.

According to the scientists, just 10.4 per cent of the 300 samples taken from pig farmers on 15 separate pig farms had antibodies to this virus strain.

According to the scientists, this means the virus poses a particularly strong chance of spreading the pandemic.