The World Health Organization says there have now been five deaths in China from a new bird flu virus.
Six people have died after being infected with the H7N9 bird flu virus, according to Chinese state media Friday.
China has begun a mass slaughter of poultry at a market in Shanghai, after a new bird flu virus was detected there.
Eleven people have been detained for spreading online rumours about the deadly H7N9 bird flu virus in the past month, People's Daily says.
It is distinct from the H5N1 bird flu virus that has caused more than 360 deaths worldwide since it was found in humans in 2003.
If the bird flu virus were to be mutating into a form more easily transmissible among humans, the risk of a global pandemic would greatly increase.
Falk Huettmann, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Alaska's Fairbanks campus, uses ESRI software to track the spread of the highly contagious H5N1 bird flu virus.
Past experiments have shown it to make viruses -- including the H5N1 bird flu virus -- more likely to infect ferrets, which are commonly used in flu research.
Turning to the H7N9 bird flu virus, the death toll rose to seven on Monday with the death of a 64-year-old man in Shanghai, Beijing Times reports.
The new bird flu virus outbreak continues to dominate media headlines, as China Central Television reports 14 diagnosed cases and five deaths in the Yangtze River Delta region.
Since China reported the first human infections of the new bird flu virus, known as H7N9, on March 31, authorities have had to compete with the online rumor mill.
While the Nature study looked at how a bird flu virus could become airborne through mutations and re-assortment with other viruses, the Science study suggests mutations alone could do the trick.
China reported three more cases of human infection of the H7N9 bird flu virus on Sunday, raising the total number of cases to 21 all in the eastern part of the country.
Recall that the so-called Center for Disease Control is where the capitalists brag in the March 23, 2005 Wall Street Journal that they created their human-to-human strain of the H5N1 Bird Flu virus.
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This is less deadly than the previous avian flu outbreak in China six years ago (that H5N1 bird flu virus killed more than 300 people after spreading from China to other countries in 2006).
Experts urged Chinese health authorities to keep testing healthy birds, saying the H7N9 virus can infect birds without causing disease, making it harder to detect than the H5N1 bird flu virus that is more familiar to Asian countries.
Flu viruses can swap genes with each other, so if someone carrying a human flu virus catches the new bird flu, the two strains could mingle inside the victim's body, creating a new, highly contagious and lethal human plague.
China has reported 11 fresh cases of bird flu, with the virus now appearing in the central province of Henan and the capital Beijing.
So are we ready to battle a pandemic strain of bird flu if this new virus picks up the capacity to more efficiently spread from person to person?
Following his guidelines, many nations are making large quantities of what they believe will be useful vaccines in the hope of defeating a possible pandemic of bird flu, should the virus spread from Asia.
Countries such as Japan and Malaysia reacted quickly to eliminate outbreaks of bird flu and are now free from the virus.
His group will attempt to nail down exactly how many mutations - and which - are sufficient to make the H5N1 avian flu virus airborne, and whether these particular mutations can also make other bird flu viruses airborne.
China's science and health authorities plan to develop a vaccine for H7N9 bird flu within seven months, amid reports that the virus has been detected in ducks in Zhejiang province, the newspaper adds.
China has confirmed two fresh cases of bird flu in Shanghai, as it attempts to contain the latest outbreak of the virus in the east of the country.
On January 18, 2009, a 27-year-old woman from eastern China died of bird flu, Chinese authorities said, making her the second person to die from the deadly virus at that time.
Xinhua points out that the World Health Organization has not ruled out pigs as the carrier of the H7N9 virus despite official assurances that there is no link between the pigs and the bird flu outbreak.
But the monitoring of birds, pigs, people and the genetics of the influenza virus have all been stepped up in response to recent outbreaks of both swine flu and bird flu.
The family is an 87-year-old man who died from bird flu on 4 March, along with one of his sons who died of pneumonia who tested negative for the virus.
Turning to China's bird flu outbreak, the government says there is still no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the H7N9 virus but does not rule out a further spread of outbreaks.
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