Thursday, November 14, 2013

Daily Tribune: Bird Flu Strain Infects Humans For The First Time

[Reports here at Pandemic Information News on H6N1 can be found here and here].

November 14, 2013
Excerpt:

...Since the H5N1 bird flu strain first broke out in southern China in 1996, public health officials have been nervously monitoring its progress — it has so far killed more than 600 people, mostly in Asia. Several other bird flu strains, including H7N9, which was first identified in China in April, have also caused concern but none has so far mutated into a form able to spread easily among people. 

“The question again is what would it take for these viruses to evolve into a pandemic strain?” wrote Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, in a commentary accompanying the new report.
She said it was worrying that scientists had no early warning signals that such new bird flus could be a problem until humans fell ill. Scientists often monitor birds to see which viruses are killing them, in an attempt to guess which flu strains might be troublesome for humans — but neither H6N1 nor H7N9 make birds very sick.

Complete article:  http://www.dailytribune.com/general-news/20131114/bird-flu-strain-infects-human-for-1st-time

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