Swine Flu Virus Attacks Farms in China, Researchers Find …

BEIJING – Chinese scientists have discovered a natural mutation in swine flu virus Africa. According to them, the swine fever virus is less deadly than in 2018 and 2019 which killed hundreds of thousands of pigs.

The findings, published in the February issue of the Chinese Journal of Veterinary Science, come amid heated debate in the industry about the evolution of a disease for which no vaccine has yet been approved.

Reuters reported last month that at least two new strains of African swine flu had been found in Chinese pig farms that appeared to be man-made. The strain causes a chronic form of African swine fever that affects production on pig farms.

Researchers at the Institute for Military Veterinary Medicine in Changchun say there appears to be a trend of increasing mortality from African swine flu with more clinical symptoms that are not easily detected and difficult to control.

These characteristics are also associated with strains that are believed to have been created for use in banned vaccines. But researchers say that with a prolonged period of swine flu circulating in China, natural variants will inevitably emerge. (Read: Chinese scientists predict that 4.4% of the country’s population will be infected with swine flu)

“Less virulent variants have also been found in Latvia and Estonia in recent years. The new strain, called HuB20, was isolated from pork samples at a market in central Hubei province,” said Hu Rongliang and colleagues at the institute under the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. .

It had a partial deletion of the adjacent CD2v gene and 8CR gene. Previous research in Russia showed that deleting the two genes could protect against African swine flu .

The gene is different from the missing gene from the viral isolate previously described to Reuters by industry players. “This variant contains no known marker genes, suggesting that a natural variant of ASFV occurs in China and this may be related to the subacute ASF epidemic in that country,” he said. (Also read: Shorten Journey to Mars, NASA Lyrics Nuclear Technology for Space Rockets)

Hu and colleagues say work is being done to validate the virulence of the new strain.

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