What exactly is swine flu? Why is it related to the human pandemic?

A recent study showed that the ability of a swine flu virus to infect humans has the potential to lead to an influenza pandemic in humans.
this has caused a lot of concern, so what exactly is swine flu, and why is it related to the human pandemic? Influenza viruses can be roughly divided into A, B, C iii, influenza A virus according to its surface structure and its genetic characteristics can be divided into many subtypes, some of which can cause respiratory diseases in pigs, so called swine flu virus.
swine flu virus can spread throughout the year in pigs, with a higher incidence and a lower fatality rate.
according to the website of Harbin Veterinary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, pigs are important hosts of influenza viruses. Two types of H1N1 influenza virus are mainly prevalent in
pigs, namely the classic H1N1 swine flu virus and the avian-like H1N1 swine flu virus.
both swine flu viruses can infect people.
especially the classic H1N1 swine flu virus, which, according to research, entered the pigs in 1918 and, through long-term evolutionary recombination, entered the population in North America in 2009, triggering a "human-infected swine flu" outbreak in Mexico and the United States, and spreading rapidly around the world.
the World Health Organization initially referred to the flu as "human-infected swine flu" and later renamed it "H1N1 influenza".
June of that year, WHO declared a global pandemic of influenza A(H1N1). On May 13, 2012,
, a swine flu outbreak broke out in the Okulov district of Novgorod Okurov, Russia.
the Russian epidemic prevention and control department to implement quarantine control within a radius of 50 kilometers, and to slaughter and incinerate the problem pigs.
pictured as epidemic prevention workers carrying the body of a pig.
Xinhua News Agency /Russian new bird-like H1N1 influenza virus in Europe in 1979 from poultry into the pig population, and then in Many countries in Europe and Asia, the spread of disease has also been reported.
at the end of 2015, the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute issued a press release saying that the team led by the institute's researchers had found that the Eurasian bird H1N1 swine flu virus had acquired the ability to infect people and had the potential to cause an influenza pandemic in humans and should be given high priority.
, researchers studied the nose swabs of nearly 30,000 pigs between 2011 and 2018 and found that the G4 EA H1N1 influenza virus (G4 genotype Eurasian avian H1N1 influenza virus) in pigs is highly contagious and has the ability to infect people and could cause a global pandemic, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
the study raised fears of another pandemic.
, Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Emergency Project, stressed on 1 July that the G4 EA H1N1 influenza virus, which is present in pigs, is not a new virus and has been monitored by countries and WHO's influenza surveillance networks for many years.
Ryan said WHO and the Cdc have worked together to develop a variety of candidate vaccine strains for the development of related vaccines and have been keeping an eye on the progress of each vaccine strain to ensure that large-scale vaccine production is possible once an effective vaccine strain is found.
he mentioned that this is part of a framework to help prevent influenza pandemics.
Source: Xinhua International Headlines.