When Flu Flies the Coop
A pandemic threatens
By Ben Harder
When a nasty strain of influenza first jumped from poultry to people in Hong Kong in 1997, government officials there ordered the slaughter and cremation of more than a million domestic birds. That action squelched the human outbreak, but the virus didn’t go away. Six years later, that flu, known as avian influenza A H5N1, again began felling people and large numbers of birds, and the trend continues. This time, it’s not confined to one country but is spreading across Asia.
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So far, this virus has rarely if ever passed directly from one person to another, as the annual human influenzas do. But each new host, regardless of its species, is like a lottery ticket for the virus, giving it yet another opportunity to evolve the characteristics that would enable it to spread person to person. Many scientists say that it’s only a matter of time before that happens.