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.
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.