Tag Archives: bird flu

Pandemic postmortems

Impact: Pandemics    January 17, 2010
The thing about pandemics is that they don’t always pan out. If they rated pandemics on a scale of 1 to 10 (which they don’t), how far down on the scale before it’s hardly a pandemic? How high on the scale and people blame the medical community for failing to raise enough warning? Every time [...]
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Two genetic changes – bird flu becomes pandemic

News: Pandemics    November 20, 2009
Given all the uproar over H1N1 (‘swine flu’), does anyone remember H5N1? That’s ‘bird flu’ and only a couple years ago it was the bête noir of the world’s health organizations. Fortunately, although deadly (roughly a 60% fatality rate), bird flu was not readily transmitted human-to-human. Now we know why: It would need to make [...]
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