Let’s get our preparedness on at #APHA15!

Getting excited for APHA’s Annual Meeting in Chicago this month? So are we! The 143rd Annual Meeting and Exposition, which will be held Oct. 31-Nov. 4, will be packed with public health information, including our favorite topic: preparedness!

The Annual Meeting program, which you can scope out online now, is full of presentations on disaster planning, response and readiness. From household preparedness and community partnerships to disease outbreaks and nuclear disasters, there’ll be plenty to feed your hunger for preparedness.

Some of our top preparedness picks at the meeting include:

• “Strengthening Disaster Epidemiology Capacity in the Nation: Update on Tools and Approaches,” which will look at the ways epidemiology is used in disaster settings;
• “Protecting Disaster Response Workers: Turning Lessons Learned into Actions,” which will examine how mental health training, apps and disaster research can benefit responders;
• “Health Care Perspective on Disaster Response and Preparedness,” which will explore earthquake preparedness, pediatric planning and post-hurricane health services; 
• “Disaster Response and Emergency Preparedness,” which will include discussions on pregnant women, Ebola communications and NATO summit preparedness; and 
• “Research Perspectives on Trauma: Mitigating the Impact of Natural Disasters and War on Survivors,” which will feature presentations on service dogs and housing stability for disaster survivors.

Once you’ve had your fill of preparedness presentations — as if that’s even possible! — head on over to our Get Ready booth at the expo. We’ll be passing out free copies of our awesome 2016 calendar, featuring adorable animals and preparedness advice. We’ll also have fact sheets and other tools that you can use in your job and community — as well as some super cool preparedness giveaways. Look for us in the APHA area of the expo, at booth 1429-10E.

If you want to meet some of the fine folks behind the Get Ready campaign - including staff who work on the @GetReady Twitter, blog and website — stop by our Social Media Meetup on Sunday at 6 p.m.

And don’t forget that while you’re at the Annual Meeting, it’s important to network like a boss — with clean hands that don’t spread disease.

If you can’t attend all of these great sessions plus the hundreds of other sessions you want to attend, you can take home the Annual Meeting by purchasing RAMP: Recorded Annual Meeting Presentations. RAMP gives you flexibility to take in sessions or events on-site without the fear of missing a presentation. Stop by any registration desk to purchase RAMP.
See you in Chicago!

Mutant flu research in the news

If you’ve paid attention to the news recently, you may have heard about researchers who created “mutant” bird flu in a lab. Sounds scary, right? Should you be worried about this human-made type of flu?

This so-called mutant flu was created from a combination of two strains of influenza, known as H5N1 and H1N1. The research was going on last year, but didn’t get major attention until December 2011, when the scientists tried to make their results public. Suddenly, the news was full of stories about a potentially dangerous form of flu. In the U.S., the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity stepped in and told the researchers that they were not allowed to share the details of their experiments. There were a lot of discussions, with health leaders such as the World Health Organization weighing in. In March, the science board decided to let the scientists publish their results. A team of researchers in Wisconsin published its study this week.

But why did these scientists want to make a mutant bird flu in the first place?

H5N1 is a type of influenza that has been very deadly to humans. It was discovered 15 years ago when a boy in Hong Kong died. Scientists found out that this new flu, H5N1, was carried by chickens. This flu is commonly called “avian” influenza in the news.

Although H5N1 is deadly to humans, it has mostly stayed in birds over the last decade and a half. And so far, H5N1 has not been able to spread from person to person. A few hundred people have died from H5N1 flu, but they are mostly people who come into close contact with chickens and other birds in countries like China, Indonesia, Egypt, India and Vietnam.

What scientists are afraid of is that H5N1 could someday mutate into a type of flu that could spread from person to person. Because humans have not been exposed to this kind of flu, we don’t have an immunity to H5N1, and our current flu vaccines wouldn’t protect us. Scientists fear that H5N1 could cause the next great flu pandemic.

So back to the mutant flu research. The scientists took wild H5N1, which can’t be spread person to person, and mixed it with parts of the H1N1 virus, which can spread to humans (and as we learned in 2009 during the global pandemic, it spreads quickly!) The researchers checked millions of viruses for mutations until they found a virus that could spread in mammals, and then they tested it. What they found was a little scary: It only took four small changes in the H5N1 virus to start spreading in the air. 

H5N1 viruses (colored gold) are grown in a lab.
Image courtesy CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith; Jacqueline Katz; Sherif R. Zaki

Were these scientists trying to create a dangerous new flu and start a big pandemic? Definitely not. The research was done to help us understand how flu viruses mutate so that we can better understand how to look for new types of flu — and hopefully stop them from spreading across the globe.

Thanks to these new studies, we now know how easily a person-to-person type of H5N1 flu may develop. But instead of being scared, we should be hopeful, because we’re also one step closer to a better flu vaccine and better ways to monitor the flu.

To learn more about H5N1 flu, visit WHO’s website. You can also learn more about the different types of flu through our post, “So, what causes the flu?”