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How does the current swine A/H1N1 flu differ from A/H1N1 influenza previously known to infect humans?

April 26, 2017differ flu h1n1 humans infect Influenza known swine

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How does the current swine A/H1N1 flu differ from A/H1N1 influenza previously known to infect humans?

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According to CDC, H1N1 swine flu viruses are antigenically very different from human H1N1 viruses and, therefore, vaccines for human seasonal flu would not provide protection from H1N1 swine flu viruses. On the other hand, regions of the nucleoprotein antigen, targeted by most rapid diagnostic tests including the BinaxNOW test, are highly conserved between strains. This means that newly emergent strains often contain the same nucleoprotein sequences as previous strains in these conserved regions. Sequencing data submitted to GenBank reveals that this is also true for the new swine flu isolates.