It's worth to check out this post on one of my favorite "popular science" blogs, The loom, about the evolution of the swine flu virus, as well as the evolution of scientific - I am not sure what the right word to use would be here - let's say progress or protocol. It hasn't been very long since we first started hearing about this flu outbreak and just today, a paper was published in Nature (it's actually available to read without having to pay for it) on the evolution of this virus.
The cool thing though about this whole thing - at least from the viewpoint of scientific progress - is that even before this paper was published, the scientists working on it in Edinburgh, UK, created a sort of wikipedia website dedicated to this issue. On this site, they posted updates on their results - BEFORE being published - for anyone to see and use for their analysis. I would say this is almost entirely unheard of in the scientific community, where the competition is often so fierce that different groups studying the same problem even try to sabotage each other.
I looked at the list of contributors on this website and I was surprised to find that they came from all over the world, from London through Edinburgh and Oxford, via Hong Kong, all the way to different universities in the US, from UCLA, through Florida to Arizona. I am impressed.
The slightly scary part of the story revelas itself from the actual publication. If you look at Figure 1, it's easy to see that there is a virus out there - they call it S-OIV - which has evolved from a few different known flu viruses by mixing.
In any case, I am glad to see that in a situation like this, where urgent analysis of available samples and data is critical to a timely response to the pandemic, scientists are putting aside the old-fashioned ways of publishing and are open to sharing information, which can lead to more rapid progress in knowledge.
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