Swine flu virus (swine flu) that has been making frantic world today is a mixture of eight genetically different influenza viruses, not the H1N1 flu virus genetic usual.
“There was a reassortment in flu viruses, where a new swine flu came from pigs that swine flu, bird flu and human flu,” said lung specialist Dr. Sita Andarini PhD, SpP after the Dialogue on pig flu lab Kyoai held in Jakarta.
Sita said the pigs on the farm always got the flu every year, for example, every late fall, but the swine flu virus is different from the H1N1 swine influenza virus is new.
“In the new swine flu virus this happened a combination of genes, so the virus changes into a new H1N1 virus gene,” he said.
Flu virus itself, he explained, many of his type. In the human flu virus H3N2, H3N1, H1N1, and H1N1 in pigs and H5N1 in birds.
He also reminded that the swine flu can occur not only in temperate regions, cold, or high latitudes, because the swine flu virus was living in the temperature optimum 37 degrees Celsius.
“Right now the spread of swine flu was heading precisely the tropics,” he said, asking the public aware of this.
To anticipate the possibility of exposed cases of swine flu, he asks, that people refuse contact with a person who had the flu, using special masks, wash hands, and resting at home when the flu.
Flu patients who suspect (suspected) swine flu, he said, is isolated for seven days after initial symptoms. After seven days and then declared cured no longer contagious and can be re-active.
However, until now swine flu vaccine as well as there is no bird flu has undergone a phase of clinical trials, while Tamiflu is an antiviral drug.
“The problem is difficult to design a vaccine and a vaccine is difficult to produce so much at the time a pandemic occurs when thousands of people already infected,” he said
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