Heads ups, people.
Cows have human flu receptors, study shows, raising stakes on bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle —
www.cnn.com/…
This story is based off of a pre-print article on the Biorxiv.org site. A link is in the article.
The key take-away is that cows have both the avian-type and the human-type Flu Receptors — Sialic Acid Receptors. This is something that had NOT been known previously.
Until recently, nobody knew what kind of sialic acid receptors cows had, because it was believed that they didn’t catch A-strain flu viruses like H5N1.
Larsen and his colleagues in the US and Denmark took tissue samples from the lungs, windpipes, brains and mammary glands of calves and cows and stained them with compounds that they knew would attach to different kinds of sialic acid receptors. They sliced the stained tissues very thinly and peered at them under a microscope.
What they saw was surprising: The tiny milk-producing sacs of the udder, called alveoli, were brimming with sialic acid receptors, and they had both the kind of receptors associated with birds and those that are more common in people. Almost every cell they looked at contained both types of receptors, said lead study author Dr. Charlotte Kristensen, a postdoctoral researcher in veterinary pathology at the University of Copenhagen.
This will need to be verified by other researchers. But it adds a chilling dimension in my book.
Global spread of H5N1 —
en.wikipedia.org/...