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By Maggie Fox, NBC News
There’s yet another pig flu virus to watch out for.
Federal health officials say this one has made three people in Minnesota sick. Like the other unusual flu strains reported this year, this strain, called H1N2v, has only been found in people who had close contact with pigs at a state fair, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday.
It’s becoming clear that pigs and people can pass influenza viruses back and forth. Health experts are watching the new strains closely because they can mutate and mix with one another to create even newer strains. The worry is the new strains will spread and cause flu pandemics, similar to the global outbreak of H1N1 swine flu virus in 2009.
So far, the three new variants identified this year -- H3n2v (the little v stands for “variant”), H1N1v and now H1N2v – don’t spread easily from person to person. Almost everyone infected has been close to pigs. One person has died from the new H3N2v virus, but everyone else has recovered. H1N2v was reported twice before in humans, in one person in 2007 in Michigan and in one person in Minnesota in 2011.
“This virus is different from the H3N2v virus that, as of today, is reported to have caused 296 human infections across 10 U.S. states since July 2012. These additional human infections underscore the fact that swine influenza viruses can spread to people after close contact with infected pigs, and support the importance of ongoing surveillance for both human and swine influenza viruses,” the CDC says in a statement on its website...
