Recent Indian Swine Flu Isolates Display Mutations for Increased Virulence

One of the new mutations was in amino acid position D225, which had been linked with increased disease severity. Another mutation, in the T200A position, allowed hemagglutinin to bind more strongly to glycan receptors, making the virus more infectious.

These findings apparently contradict previous reports from Indian health officials that the strain had not diverged from the 2009 H1N1 version.

“We are really caught between a rock and a hard place, with little information and a lot of misinformation,” said senior author Dr. Ram Sasisekharan, professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “When you do real-time surveillance, get organized, and deposit these sequences, then you can come up with a better strategy to respond to the virus. The point we are trying to make is that there is a real need for aggressive surveillance to ensure that the anxiety and hysteria are brought down and people are able to focus on what they really need to worry about. We need to understand the pathology and the severity, rather than simply relying on anecdotal information. The goal is to get a clearer picture of the strains that are circulating and therefore anticipate the right kind of a vaccine strategy for 2016.”

The report was published in the March 11, 2015, issue of the journal Cell Host & Microbe.

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