Google Earth Environment Guide

The Flight of the Bird Flu

Tracking an ever-changing virus could help stop a pandemic
Influenza viruses have a nasty habit of mutating constantly. This makes it hard for scientists to develop effective vaccines. Just when virologists think they’ve got the little buggers figured out, a virus morphs bits of its genome to remain a cunning infection machine. Daniel Janies, a professor of zoology at Ohio State University’s department of biomedical informatics, has been tracking these mutations in the H5N1 avian-flu virus for years. But once he loaded his data into Google Earth to map changes in RNA by location, he saw something unexpected. “Not only was the virus moving westward,” Janies says, “it was mutating in a way that allowed it to infect mammals, making it more dangerous to human populations.”

The map revealed another curious twist. In addition to “avian flu hopping, skipping, and jumping across Southeast Asia, it was being moved very rapidly and very far by some other process,” he says. One case, in October 2004, showed a strain jumping 5,700 miles from Bangkok to Brussels in a single bound. On further investigation, Janies learned that the virus had hitched itself to a crested eagle purchased at a local market and illegally shipped to Europe in someone’s carry-on.

Janies is now tracking 1,000 avian-flu strains, or “isolates”—more than three times what he started with—as they march around the globe. He’s building a Google Earth database for seasonal influenza. And his team is mapping H5N1’s resistance to certain drugs by location, a project that could help stop a potential pandemic. Knowing where and when the virus mutates is critical to developing a vaccine. “If there is a human outbreak,” he says, “we want to be able to get new virus data at 5 p.m., let our supercomputers run with it overnight, and give you an updated mutation map in the morning.”

Download the H5N1 Visualization for Google Earth here [KMZ file]

And check out PopSci's complete coverage of the future of the environment at popsci.com/futurecity.