flu (Page 14)

After nine years of effort, in a top secret program, scientists have recreated the deadly 1918 Spanish flu virus, which caused one of the biggest pandemics in human history. The virus is stockpiled in a government laboratory in Atlanta, Georgia. Despite the danger, the DNA sequence of this flu is now available to scientists over the internet.

Ian Sample writes in The Guardian that when the recreated virus was injected into mice by researcher Jeffery Taubenberger, they all died within six days. When mice were injected with another flu virus, they recovered.
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In announcements about how lethal the upcoming bird flu pandemic will be, experts are contradicting themselves. As we’ve told our readers before, the best weapon against bird flu is to wash your hands whenever you come in from outside, because flu virus lives on surfaces. This is especially important now that Tamiflu may not be working anymore. In Asian countries, children are the first to contract bird flu because it’s usually their chore to feed the family’s chickens and ducks. Kids are the first to catch flu in the US as well, then they pass it on to the rest of us.
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We recently put up a story about keeping West Nile disease in perspective. It’s easy to shrug off bird flu as well, but you shouldn’t do it. Here at unknowncountry.com, we warned to you to sell your SUV two years ago, before gas prices started their dramatic rise. Now we’re telling you to get a prescription for Tamiflu and keep it on hand, since it’s the only antidote for avian flu.
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Human-to-human transmission of bird flu in four Southeast Asian countries has caused scientists to announce that the threat of a bird flu pandemic looms large. At first scientists weren’t sure it was spreading from person to person, but now they have documented cases of this in Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. It’s inevitable that it will soon strike the US.
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