The Change Mariner

Experts: Bird Flu Could Become Epidemic

Yahoo! News:

With luck, the world will escape the latest outbreak of bird flu with no more than the six human deaths already blamed on it and the loss of millions of chickens. But public health experts worry of a much greater disaster: A catastrophe they say is among the worst imaginable, a global outbreak of an entirely new form of human flu.

There is no clear sign that will happen. Nevertheless, avian influenza's sudden sweep through Asia, along with its tendency for wholesale mutation, leave many wondering about the bug's potential for rampant spread among humans. It is a possibility the medical journal The Lancet calls "massively frightening."

"The question everybody is asking is, 'Is this the progenitor to a pandemic?'" says Dr. Gregory Poland, chief of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic.

Influenza pandemics typically strike three or four times a century. The worst in the past 100 years, the 1918-19 Spanish flu, caused an estimated 40 million to 50 million deaths. Another is considered inevitable and perhaps overdue, but when it will happen and how bad it will be are almost totally unpredictable.

The nightmare this time would be a flu virus leaping from birds to people and spreading, introducing a disease for which humans have no natural defense.

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