Word: avian
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...weeks, and, according to Forbes.com, “could lead to the deaths of 1.9 million Americans and the hospitalization of 8.5 million more people with costs exceeding $450 billion.” Such a scenario now seems vastly more likely with the discovery, last week, that the avian flu virus can mutate independently to become a lethal strain to humans...
...millions of wild birds heading across the Urals toward Africa stop off at the protected wetlands site at Lake Manyas in Asian Turkey. That may explain why, not far away at a farm in Kiziksa, 1,700 turkeys died this month. Scientists confirmed they were infected with H5N1, the avian influenza strain responsible for 60 human deaths in Asia since 2003. Experts now fear the virus is inexorably winging its way toward Europe. Turkish authorities quickly imposed a quarantine around the infected farm, culling 8,600 birds. But another H5N1 outbreak hit Romania's Danube delta wetlands, across the Black...
...WHAT MAKES THIS PARTICULAR AVIAN FLU SO DEADLY...
...tests on samples taken from two of the most recent human victims of bird flu show no cause for immediate alarm. "There are no obvious changes in the virus that we tested," says Dr. Guan Yi, an avian-flu expert at the University of Hong Kong who has helped sound the pandemic alarm. For now, he says, there's "nothing new. Nothing to worry about." The viral genes are still the same avian-flu genes that haven't figured out how to spread easily from one person to another...
Since 1997, the H5N1 strain of the avian-flu virus has traveled steadily west across Asia. The current outbreak began in December 2003, infecting humans in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. Although Southeast Asia has borne the brunt of the disease, scientists fear that infected migratory birds will spread it further, resulting in a global pandemic...