“We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans,” said Kawaoka, who led the study.
“The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus,” Kawaoka said.
Recent samples of virus taken from birds in Africa and Europe all carry the mutation, Kawaoka and colleagues report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens
“I don’t like to scare the public, because they cannot do very much. But at the same time it is important to the scientific community to understand what is happening,” Kawaoka said in a telephone interview.
Honestly, if a pandemic comes, I doubt it will come from Bird Flu. I don’t really have any good reason for this belief, just Murphy law. Disasters never seem to come from where you expect them.
On a similar vein, why don’t people worry more about the flu strains that already afflict humans mutating into killers? Seems to me that all they would need is a little fine tuning to start killing large numbers of people.