18 October 2006
Bronco Bill – at 21:04
Continued from here
a’Akova – at 20:34
I think may be some conflation of two separate issues here. The first is where the virus is good a binding, and the second is how the infection proceeds. See this paper which compares virulence of two “avian receptor” variants and found that HA and NA segments were insufficient to increase virulence, but PB1, PB2 and PA in combination were.
While receptor binding may affect transmissibilty in humans, it may be completely irrelevant to ultimate virulence during infection.