In Florida, racing greyhounds are coming down with the same flu virus that affects race horses, even though they don’t race on the same tracks. We know that “bird flu” jumps from chickens to humans and SARS jumped to us from civet cats. While monkeys pass HIV to humans, they get it from another, unknown source. However, this is the first known incidence of flu jumping from one animal species to another.
read more
It’s almost inevitable that the Asian bird flu virus will eventually mutate into a form that humans can pass to one another. When that happens, it will spread rapidly around the world, just as SARS did. So we need to know: Just how dangerous is bird flu to humans?
read more
In Asia, bird flu has jumped to new species, killing three house cats and infecting a white tiger in a Thailand zoo. Since there is also bird flu in the U.S., the virus will probably jump to other species here as well?and maybe eventually to humans. Once humans contract the flu, it will be spread by overseas travelers, just as SARS was. Health workers predict that Asian bird flu will be a bigger and more dangerous epidemic than SARS because it will be a new virus in humans, one that our immune systems are not equipped to handle.
read more
A new form of bird flu, different from the Asian strain, has turned up in the U.S. As scientists worry that bird flu in Asia may have mutated and become contagious, they are looking at what happened in the past. In 1918, the worst flu epidemic in history killed 50,000,000 people worldwide, caused by a flu virus that jumped from birds to humans.
Researcher John Skehel says, “If we find that the structure of a bird virus resembles that of the structure of the 1918 virus that we have determined, then we will know that it potentially poses a threat to man, and it will have to be kept under more active surveillance than usual.”
read more