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May 03, 2007
Researchers at the University of Colorado, Ohio State University and the American Museum of Natural History are using Google Earth technology to trace the spread of avian flu on a new "supermap," the Rocky Mountain News reports.
The downloadable map tracks from the mid-1990s the H5N1 virus in Guangdong, China, to southeast Asia, Africa, the Philippines and Europe. The map uses different colors to display the mutations and animals infected, which helps scientists predict which mutations might occur that would enable it to be transmitted to humans.
The map makers have tracked two proteins that have not mutated as they have spread across half of the world, which is a positive sign that mammals will not be infected easily. However, they also are tracking Lysine-627, a virus genotype that helps determine how infective avian flu can be to humans and other mammals, the Mountain News reports.
Anyone with updated Google software can access the video of the avian flu map online, but additional knowledge may be needed to understand the map's details, Andrew Hill, a University of Colorado graduate student and co-author of a study about the map in Systematic Biology, said (Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News, 5/3).
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