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.
In this respect if we compare the 1918 Spanish flu, a swine flu variant (largest human killer of all time that took up to 100 million lives) and the 2009 Swine Flu, we see that a drugs cure would come far too late and most of us (between 300milion and over 1 billion worldwide is estimated) would be dead.
So while it is not certain that the Dutch team had created a deadly human strain of bird flu, it seems to be a real possibility.
The catch, Canadian officials say, is that the animals may have caught the flu from a human.
Even if an outbreak of a new human flu strain were quickly contained, it could still have drastic economic consequences.
ECONOMIST: The spreading bird-flu menace reaches Europe | The
Australian company CSL announced this week it planned to start the first human trials of a swine flu vaccine in Australia.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials now recommend that schools stop closing when a case of swine flu is confirmed at a school, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday.
H1N1 is a more appropriate label for this flu, because a direct link from pig to human has not been established, according to Professor Marie Gramer's who studies swine disease at the University of Minnesota.
CNN: Inaccurate 'swine' flu label hurts industry, pork producers say
Plans were hatched for how best to respond to the threat from a virus that is infecting poultry around the world and might trigger a deadly pandemic of human flu.
Close surveillance is vital to check that bird flu is not mutating into a human form.
The move from level three to level four on the WHO's six-level threat scale means the world body has determined the virus is capable of significant human-to-human transmission -- a major step toward a flu pandemic, said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the agency's assistant director-general.
The virus, a hybrid of swine, avian and human flu, can jump from person to person with relative ease.
Ferrets are often used in flu research because the animal's respiratory tract responds to flu viruses in much the same way as a human's.
But we have analysed the potential killer virus against the history of the 2009 Swine Flu and where a drugs cure for a future avian human-to-human killer virus will come far too late.
FORBES: H7N9 Bird Flu Cases Rise To 49, Deaths At 11 In China; Beijing Shuts Poultry Markets
The country's Ministry of Health had then moved to allay fears over the outbreak, saying that although further human bird flu cases were possible throughout China, there wouldn't be a large-scale outbreak, Xinhua and CCTV said.
In other domestic news, the World Health Organization is watching out for mutations and possible human-to-human transmission of the new H7N9 bird flu strain after two family cluster cases - a father-and-son cluster and a husband-and-wife cluster - were detected in Shanghai, China Daily reports.
On Monday, Thomas Lonngren, the head of the European Medicines Agency, said such a human vaccine might not be ready before next year's winter flu season.
ECONOMIST: The spreading bird-flu menace reaches Europe | The
While this is a new strain of bird flu, WHO said there has been no evidence of human to human transmission.
Fortunately, such a doomsday scenario is unlikely: none of the other recent outbreaks of avian flu resulted in human epidemics.
Health authorities are testing a family infected by H7N9 in Shanghai for human-to-human transmission of the new bird flu strain, The Beijing News reports.
Trained at Wayne State and the University of Michigan as a physician and an epidemiologist, Brilliant sees a near-certainty that another AIDS, ebola or bird flu is coming, likely caused by human-animal interaction.
应用推荐