[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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