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UPDATE – A Continental Airlines jet touched down at Newark Airport earlier today with 280 passengers aboard, 85 of whom had taken a river cruise in China and appeared to be sick with a flu-like disease. Has bird flu arrived in New Jersey? UPDATE: On CNN.com, Katy Byron quotes Dennis Quinton of the New Jersey Dept. of Homeland Security as saying that there is “nothing to be concerned about. The plane has officially been allowed to enter the US.”
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It may be safe to travel to countries (mostly in Asia) that have bird flu, but it’s not necessarily safe to travel on an airplane with people who have it!

Viruses are easily passed around in the confined air of an aircraft, and an a team of researchers has constructed a model that predicts how an emerging pandemic influenza might spread across the globe by airliners, just as SARS did.

The H5N1 bird flu virus has not yet resulted in a pandemic because the virus lacks the ability to spread efficiently between humans. It’s known that flocks of birds have infected people, although not all researchers agree that it has been passed from person to person.
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Scientists are working hard to learn the secrets of bird flu?before it takes us by surprise. But the virus could enter the population from the scientists themselves, if we aren?t careful. For instance, a lab in Texas recently almost leaked the deadly bird flu virus out into the environment.

Last April, a researcher at a lab at the University of Texas in Austin who was doing experiments mixing human and bird flu viruses, has an accident involving a centrifuge that caused a cap to come off a test tube, which could have spilled a human flu virus which had been modified to carry a gene from H5N1 bird flu.
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