Unknown Country has previously reported unexplained mass extinction-style events occurring in fish and other marine life (see Rivers of Death and Silent Seas), but the phenomenon also appears to be spreading to our bird life.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that, for the third consecutive year, more blackbirds fell from the sky on New Year’s Eve in Beebe, Arkansas.
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Many of us tend to ignore these warnings, since they turned out to be a sort of false alarm last time. Asians get bird flu directly from the ducks and geese they keep in cages, before they’re ready to eat them. Cages of these birds can also be found in outdoor markets in many different Asian countries. What scientists worry about is if the bird flu virus can mutate so that it can be passed from person to person, the way swine flu is now.
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The swine flu scare may have been a gigantic hoax, but what about bird flu? It seems to have never materialized either. In order to study the disease, two teams of scientists have genetically engineered a deadly flu virus, causing a great deal of controversy: What if terrorists get hold of it?
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The great fear about bird flu is that the virus will mutate, so that it can pass between humans (the way regular flu does) and not just between poultry and people. A father in China has been diagnosed with bird flu that he probably caught from his sick son. But this MAY be because they share the same genes!
Researchers note that the other cases of suspected person-to-person transmission have also been between blood relatives, leading them to suspect that some people may have a genetic susceptibility to bird flu. BBC News quotes virology expert Wendy Barclay as saying, “The experience here reinforces the idea that there are still several barriers the virus must overcome before it acquires human transmissibility.”
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