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Title: What is a pandemic? What about the Influenza virus contributes to its ability to create a pandemic ... Post by: talabi1 on Nov 30, 2016 What is a pandemic? What about the Influenza virus contributes to its ability to create a pandemic situation?
Title: Re: What is a pandemic? What about the Influenza virus contributes to its ability to create a ... Post by: akorne on Mar 5, 2017 A pandemic is a rapidly spreading, highly infectious, potentially dangerous pathogen.
There are two reasons the flu virus can cause pandemics. 1. the RNA polymerase lacks a proof-reading ability therefore mutations accumulate in the RNA genome at an accelerated rate. 2. The virus is strange in that it has a segmented genome (much like we have chromosomes). It has 8 segments and when the viruses are built the segments stuffed into the virion are random. This becomes a major problem if the cell is infected with influenza from 2 different sources for example human flu and bird flu. The potential here is that a human flu ends up with genes from the bird flu which would cause major changes to the virus and the immune system would be baffled. |