Word: birds
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...long-term threat from influenza. Another pandemic could arise at any time, and a new paper published in the Feb. 22 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) demonstrates that it could even come from an existing flu virus that many of us have forgotten about: the H5N1 bird flu, which has infected 478 people in 15 countries since 2003, with 286 deaths - a fatality rate higher than...
...virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, combined a strain of the deadly H5N1 avian virus with strains of H3N2 human seasonal flu, creating 254 new, mutated viruses. By injecting them in lab mice, researchers found that some of the hybrid viruses were both deadly (like bird flu) and transmissible (like seasonal human flu) - the kind of genetically mutated superflu viruses that experts have been warning about for decades. (See how to prevent illness...
...humans in 1997, has never given rise to a pandemic is that the virus does not appear to spread easily among people. It has been transmitted between humans only in rare cases, usually among family members in close conditions. But the fear has long been that if bird flu genetically mixed with human flu - in a process called reassortment, in which two flu viruses swap genes in an infected cell - it could create a new strain that is both deadly and transmissible, as illustrated by the new PNAS study. That's how many past pandemic viruses, including 2009 H1N1, were...
...guard, newer contributors were busy greeting the old in the most scandalous of drunken attempts at lip-locking. Meanwhile, a certain business-oriented chap was frantically conveying his concerns over orientation to a future Cantabridgian, pita-wrapped Greek delicacy in hand all the while. For one special birthday bird, it was the thunder that was chocolate-flavored this year, not the cake, which was instead perfumed with the scent of intoxicating herbs. ‘Girl’ needs to make sure that when she heads to a party with the intention of tracking down some supplements, she doesn?...
...theory, that could prove to be a serious problem. In some cases, predators will be able to adapt to changes in their prey. In others, however, maybe not. A 2006 study in Nature, for example, documented plummeting populations of a bird called the pied flycatcher in the Netherlands. The reason: an earlier spring was speeding up the emergence of caterpillars that were the birds' staple. But because the flycatchers' were leaving their wintering grounds in West Africa at the regular time, their eggs were now hatching in the Netherlands too late in the season, after the caterpillars were nearly gone...