in August 1998, a barking cough resounded throughout a North Carolina pig farm in which all the thousands of breeding sows fell ill. An aggressive H3N2 virus was discovered, the type of influenza that had been circulating in humans since 1968. Not only was this highly unusual—only a single strain of human virus had ever previously been isolated from an American pig population—but upon sequencing of the viral genome, researchers found that it was not just a double reassortment (a hybrid of human and pig virus, for example) but a never-before-described
1291 triple reassortment, a hybrid of three viruses—a human virus, a pig virus, and a bird virus.
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