ABOVE: Farmed swine are routinely inspected by veterinarians, who often take samples for viral testing and, occasionally, sequencing.
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It was the spring of 2009; US President Barack Obama was just settling into the White House when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) informed him that a new influenza A virus had suddenly appeared in kids in Southern California and was likely to spread around the world. The global pandemic that scientists feared had finally arrived, only no one predicted it would come from North America.
National security advisors and public health officials had been warning the White House for years that dangerous flu viruses were circulating in birds that were only a handful of mutations away from jumping to humans, potentially sparking a pandemic like the notorious 1918 influenza outbreak that claimed more than 20 million lives globally. But US health officials expected the next globe-trotting ...
