In papers published tomorrow (23 March) by Nature and Science, they say the virus may be physically unable to reach vulnerable cells deep inside human lungs.
Although H5N1 is very good at spreading through large populations of birds, it has infected fewer than 200 people since 2003.
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this week’s findings show that the virus is rarely able to attach to cells in the upper respiratory tract.
What’s more, it seems that mucus could be trapping the virus, which is then expelled before it can replicate, says Thijs Kuiken of the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands.
While H5N1 cannot enter cells close to the nose and mouth, both Kuiken’s team and another led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, found cells deep inside the human lungs that the H5N1 virus can bind to — if it is able to get that far.
This fits neatly with observations made during autopsies of people killed by the virus: that most damage was deep in lung tissue…