Thanksgiving Dinner's On!

Oh, I do hope I get an invite to your scrumptious dinner, Piffka! <hint, hint> :wink:

2 bushels of chestnuts and about a bathtub of bread cubes (which we will start making next weeK). Its got onions potatoes celery, about 50 lb of cornbread, lots of sage and pepper

Dr. Thomas Fanning, a scientist in Dr. Taubenberger's group, mentioned that he had a friend at the Smithsonian who worked at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. It had several thousand preserved birds from the early 20th century that were floating in Mason jars of alcohol.

From there, they reached James P. Dean, a supervisor in the division of birds at the museum, who sent Dr. Taubenberger a computer printout of the birds in the museum's collection - hundreds of birds, with notes telling the species and the exact times and places where they were collected. But which to choose?

Dr. Taubenberger consulted with one of the leading experts on bird flus, Richard Slemons of Ohio State, who chose 40 birds on the museum's list, all waterfowl collected around 1918. The museum found 25 of them.

The scientists took tiny pinches of tissue from passages of the birds' excretory tracts, or cloacas, and Dr. Taubenberger looked for flu viruses in the tissue. Six of the birds had a flu virus. The genetic coding for the amino acids in those viruses was exactly like that in bird flu viruses today, Dr. Taubenberger found.

In fact, the viruses had not even evolved. Human influenza viruses change every year, mutating slightly so they can reinfect people who had just had the flu and developed antibodies against it. But birds, Dr. Slemons said, do not have much of an immune response to influenza, and so there is no particular pressure for the virus to mutate.

Another reason the viruses stay the same, he said, is that some birds live for only a couple of years and so, every year, the viruses have a new bird population to infect. Finally, he said, birds are chronically infected with lots of flu viruses at once, and all the viruses coexist peacefully.

"There are so many that there is no selective pressure on any virus," he said.

But if bird viruses do not evolve and if the waterfowl viruses in 1915 and 1916 look just like bird viruses today, where did the 1918 virus come from? Or was it really a bird virus?

After all, at the time that he looked at the Smithsonian birds, Dr. Taubenberger had reconstructed only part of the virus's genetic sequence. Maybe when he had the whole thing, the picture would change.

It did not. The entire sequence, published last month in Nature, had the distinctive protein structures of a bird virus, he said. And it had that same peculiar way of spelling its amino acids.

When he compared the 1918 virus with today's human flu viruses, Dr. Taubenberger noticed that it had alterations in just 25 to 30 of the virus's 4,400 amino acids. Those few changes turned a bird virus into a killer than could spread from person to person.

Dr. Taubenberger noticed that, so far, the A(H5N1) viruses in Asia have just a few of those changes. They do not, however, have the unusual ways of coding the amino acid instructions that the 1918 virus had.

msolga wrote:

Oh, I do hope I get an invite to your scrumptious dinner, Piffka! <hint, hint> :wink:

Ah, Olga. I am sorry to say we had our dinner early, last Sunday evening, which is what made me start this thread. Mr.P and I will be going away for Thanksgiving weekend this year so we can be closer to our kids. They work at an inn on the other side of the state and we'll be paying guests there. (See the link in the post I made to D'artagnan.) We plan to take three days off... taste wine there, walk their trails and relax in the chilly air of eastern Washington.

However, I made some very tasty hot turkey sandwiches last night for dinner and there are still plenty of leftovers. I can make some for you in a jiffy.

The sandwich is here. Actually, I made two, one on very healthy brown bread with loads of fibre (see, even spelt it correctly for you) and the other on white "Farmer's" bread which Mr.Piffka prefers. They have a teeny bit of mayo on each slice of bread, loads of sliced dark and white meat, a big spoonful of cranberry sauce and some organic baby greens.