2,000 influenza virus genomes now completed and publicly ...( or approximately 36000 deaths and 200...)

or approximately 36,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations each year. Globally, influenza results in an estimated 250,000 to half a million deaths annually. Seasonal flu shots are updated every year to target the latest strains in circulation. Developing such vaccines is challenging, however, because the influenza virus is prone to high mutation rates when it replicates, and these mutations can alter the virus enough that vaccines against one strain may not protect against another strain.

An even greater concern is the potential for an influenza pandemic caused by the emergence of a new, highly lethal virus strain that is easily transmitted from person to person. Influenza pandemics have occurred three times in the last century, the most lethal of which was the pandemic of 1918, which caused an estimated 40 to 50 million deaths worldwide.

"A few years ago, only limited genetic information on influenza viruses existed in the public domain, and much of the sequence data was incomplete," says Maria Y. Giovanni, Ph.D., who oversees the NIAID Microbial Sequencing Centers. "The Influenza Genome Sequencing Project has filled that gap by vastly increasing the amount of influenza sequence data and rapidly making it available to the entire scientific community. Subsequently, there has been a marked increase in the number of scientists worldwide depositing influenza genome sequence data into the public domain including scientists at St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

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Contact: Jason Socrates Bardi
jbardi@niaid.nih.gov
301-402-1663
NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
21-Feb-2007


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