H5N1 Bird Flue

H5N1 Bird Flue

The eight people in pakistan who became infected with the H5N1 bird flue strain probably got ill as a result of contact with poultry and some degree of human-to-human transmission.

Human-to-human transmission of H5N1 bird flu is extremely rare, but not unheard of.

What is H5N1?

H5N1 is a strain of the bird flu virus - the strain everybody is worried about because human beings have no immunity against it, it is very virulent (powerful and dangerous).

Scientists are afraid that the H5N1 bird flu virus strain will sooner or later transform and become easily human transmissible. This has not happened yet. It is still exceedingly difficult for birds to infect humans, and even harder for a human to infect another human.

It is thought that one of the ways H5N1 could mutate would be by infecting a person who is ill with the normal human flu virus. The bird flu virus would then have the chance to exchange genetic information with the human flu virus and acquire its ability to spread easily from human-to-human (become easily human transmissible). If this happened, we could be facing a serious, global flu pandemic.


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