Could you be a flu super-spreader?

ACCORDING to the UK’S risk register, the number one threat to life isn’t terrorism, it’s pandemic flu.

Unlike seasonal flu that strikes in the winter months, pandemic flu is a worldwide outbreak. It can emerge at any moment and as history has proven, it can be catastrophic.

In new TV show Contagion! The BBC Four Pandemic, mathematician Dr Hannah Fry and emergency medic Dr Javid Abdelmoneim use app technology to ‘infect’ people and see how fast their virtual disease can spread in 24 hours.

Despite advances in medicine, experts admit there’s still a lot they don’t understand about flu infection and contagiousness, which means if a potent strain materialises, it still has the potential to devastate populations. So what do we know? context of other infections,” explains Dr Chiu. An example is cook Mary Mallon, born in 1869 and nicknamed Typhoid Mary.

She was thought to have infected so many people she was quarantined on an island near New York where she died 23 years later.

“In flu infections it’s not been easy to uncover who super-spreaders are because when flu appears it’s very common, so it’s almost impossible to track down whether a single person has infected two or 100 people,” says Dr Chiu.

“What we do know is people produce different amounts of virus in their nose when infected.” A social super-spreader is someone who comes into contact with a lot of people.

“You could say children are superspreaders because they make a lot of virus as well as the behavioural factors,” says Dr Chiu. “They’re often snotty and don’t wash their hands enough so that contributes to them being more contagious.”

Researchers also think some people might drive the spread of a pandemic because something in their genes means they become particularly contagious.

In Contagion!, Dr Abdelmoneim gets access to an experiment, conducted by Dr Chiu and funded by the US Department of Defence, which tries to predict who the biological super-spreaders are.

“The study is to understand why some people produce more virus than others but I don’t expect in the near future to be able to definitively say, ‘Yes, this is the kind of person who’s a super-spreader,’ says Dr Chiu.

Dr Chiu’s study sees healthy volunteers given up to two million particles of the 2009 swine flu virus to sniff. One of the volunteers is lecturer Joydeep, 36, who shows few symptoms but makes a lot of virus in his nose. This suggests there’s something about his biology that could make him very infectious – a biological super-spreader.

“I hadn’t heard of this term before. I feel a little guilty about it,” says Joydeep. “But how can I put it, every other human might be a super-spreader but doesn’t know it. All I can do is boost my immune system so I don’t get it and spread it. But it’s important to be aware of what status I am, so I’m careful around people, especially babies.”