February 5, 2004

Newsfeed: Robert Lamb

Robert Lamb discusses the bird flu pandemic

Global health experts have called for a worldwide response to a bird flu pandemic in Asia. According to Robert Lamb, John Evans Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, health officials are concerned about a human mutation of the deadly virus.

What we’re concerned about is, what if a human is already infected with a known human strain of the influenza virus? The bird flu virus might mix its genes with the human virus and you get a new virus emerging that could spread from human to human. And if it’s as pathogenic for humans as it appears to be for birds, then we’d be in very serious trouble.

Lamb says culling birds is currently the best method to prevent the disease from spreading.

The best way of trying to make sure it doesn’t leave the bird population is to cull all of the birds, and so in most countries in Asia, they’re culling birds and their chicken populations. The problem is that, as this report says today, it’s been found in migratory birds. But you can’t really cull migratory birds. I mean, that’s pretty much an impossibility. So there may not be a lot we can do except to cull the domestic birds, chickens.

According to Lamb, SARS and the bird flu virus are different.

They’re absolutely different altogether. And what makes it really different is that SARS doesn’t spread that well, whereas in fact the influenza virus spreads much better and much faster. It’s spreading rapidly. What’s going to stop it, we have no idea.

Lamb believes people shouldn’t be concerned about catching this bird flu now.

There shouldn’t be concern at this point because there’s no evidence of human to human spread. And when that happens, it won’t matter whether you travel or not. It’s going to spread anyway. So it would be very hard to limit.

— Samira Puskar

Northwestern University Newsfeed is designed for use by radio stations and features Northwestern faculty members discussing their research and top news stories.