Sure it kills birds but it won't kill you...

[Tiggeroshii]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-bird23oct23,0,4915529.story

Sure, it kills birds, but it won't kill you
By Wendy Orent, Wendy Orent is the author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease."


IT MUST SEEM like the sky is falling — that it's about to rain chaos and death as the dreaded H5N1 avian flu appears to close in.

Last spring, bird flu broke out in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. It spread to western China, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia in the summer. How did it travel half a continent?

<Snip>
But Peter Palese doesn't think so. He is lab director at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where the technique that re-created the 1918 genes — known as reverse genetic engineering — was developed. He and associate Adolfo Garcia-Sastre contend that what the resurrected virus really shows is how supremely adapted it is — how well its parts fit together, how perfectly it works. The sublime malignance of the 1918 virus doesn't lie in one part but rather in how the genes function together. Evolution shaped this virus to be a sleek, effective killing machine

[MsConduct]

1. Here's some more info, directly from CDC

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avian/gen-info/facts.htm

[regnaD kciN]

2. O.K., I can see...

...that, as the virus persists among birds, it will become less deadly. I can also see that the spread of the 1918 flu was abetted by the conditions on the Western Front during WWI. However...

...once the virus has mutated into a form which allows it to be transferred from human to human, it really won't matter whether or not it weakens thereafter among birds.

...although the Western Front conditions contributed to the spread of the 1918 flu among humans, its effects certainly weren't restricted to that area. It spread worldwide, including throughout the U.S.

Finally, I would note that the avian flu virus has already shown itself to be quite virulent among humans, killing over 50% of those infected. If that form of the virus becomes transmissable among humans, pretty much everything in the article become irrelevant.

:scared:

[unhappycamper]

3. The 1918 pandemic started outside Ft. Riley, KS

and was spread by WW1 US troop movements. It was called the Spanish flu because the Spanish press was the first to report it. (The US and British press were prevented from reporting it.)

Source:
The great influenza : the epic story of the deadliest plague in history / John M. Barry, 2004.