Swine Flu and Bird Flu, What the difference.

It is really a shocking incident. Hundreds of people are dying all over bcause of this flu.The symptoms of swine flu are almost similar to that of a bird flu. But the main source of spreading these disease are pigs.It is a dangerous communicable disease and it must be stopped.

Okay here is the breakdown of these flu's and the difference between them. The bird flu, swine (pig) flu, and human flu are all not new. They've been around for more than a century (wayyy longer than that actually), a flu is like any other sickness, they've been around for ages, like a cold for example. There were a series of outbreaks of the swine flu in 1918, 1976 Us outbreak, 1988, 1998, 2007, and today in 2009, so the swine flu (including the bird flu) is not new. Focusing on 1918, some think that the pigs caught the flu from us humans, I will elaborate on how one catches a flu. The human flu is the common flu we usually get in the winter, symptoms are sneezing, coughing, running nose, etc...The bird and swine flu are basically the same thing, except those flu's only affect birds and pigs (bird flu affects birds, swine flu affects birds). Now what causes a flu? Well a flu is caused by a virus, not a computer virus, those teeny tiny ones that you need a really strong microscope to see. Now just like living organisms, the virus can evolve and mutate. It is rare that a human catches the flu from a pig, and if they do, they usually don't cause an outbreak. But being in close contact with pigs all the time increases the chances. Now elaborating the viruses ability to mutate. Basically, the pig is the most susceptible host to catch the flu, ranging from the human, to swine, to the avian (bird) flu. So when a pig catches them, they may have more then one flu, this result may allow the virus to exchange genes and form new more dangerous strains. This may allow the virus the ability to not only catch from swine to swine and swine to human...but it may also be able to catch on from human to human. Thus this is usually what causes an outbreak, when the virus's genes reassort themselves and the virus may gain or lose strains. The ability for the virus to change from time to time makes it hard for scientists to come up with a vaccine. This is basically the difference between pig and bird and human flu's, they affect different animals according to their names. But sometimes the viruses may mutate and form new strains, which may either be more dangerous or less harmful. "Knowledge is the key, probably the biggest key out there, it opens doors to everything you'd ever need in life, success, safety, security, etc..." EduCashin

There are many different varieties of the influenza virus. Many of them are not infectious to humans but occasionally a variety whose host is another animal (such as pigs or birds) mutates in such a way that it can affect humans. This is what has happened to a version of the H1N1 virus, which was hitherto found in pigs. Viruses, even though they are much smaller than bacteria and relatively simple organisms are, nevertheless amazingly sophisticated and can adapt themselves or evolve to live in other hosts. Because those hosts have not yet developed immunity to the new varieties, they can be dangerous. The fact that one feels ill is not due to the virus itself but to the body's reaction to it as it uses energy to develop suitable defences. Usually, once you have had and recovered from one kind of flu, you are not likely to be ill from that variety again because the body 'knows' how to deal with it.