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One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Home » Birding » Blog » One Flu Over the Cuckoo's NestThere's some good news for we anthropoids regarding the Bird Flu scare. Two separate studies by Japanese and Dutch scientists and published in the current Science and Nature issues have reported that the reason the disease is so devastating and lethal is the same reason it can't spread easily from person to person. The virus will thus be much less likely to mutate into a form that can spread like an epidemic.
Avian influenza has only infected around 200 people worldwide and killed around half of them. Each documented case has been the result of a close contact with infected birds, but the virus can't easily jump from birds to humans and there are no known instances of it spreading from human to human.
The Dutch/Japanese reports indicate that the virus enters birds in a different part of the respiratory tract than a human, and is therefore more difficult to spread unless the virus mutates. Read more about the technical reasons here.
I've been skeptical of this whole Bird Flu "scare" since the SARS malarkey blew over a few years back. Either give me a plague with giant, disgusting buboes and lesions that turn people into killer-mutant-zombies or it ain't worth getting out of bed over.
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