The H5N1 virus can move from birds to people through close contact.
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Bird flu does not usually pass from person-to-person, but the disease is closely monitored because of concerns that the H5N1 virus could mutate allowing to spread more easily among people.
About 60 percent of those infected die, and experts have long feared the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily from person to person, possibly igniting a pandemic.
Now a new computer simulation confirms what some long suspected: The H5N1 virus already has spread from human to human--or at least it did in one case cluster last year in Indonesia.
Experts urged Chinese health authorities to keep testing healthy birds, saying the H7N9 virus can infect birds without causing disease, making it harder to detect than the H5N1 bird flu virus that is more familiar to Asian countries.
Experiments in Germany tested 22 flavonoids on human lung cells infected with the H5N1 influenza A virus.
Jude Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, used reverse genetics to produce a vaccine against the H5N1 avian flu virus.
It is distinct from the H5N1 bird flu virus that has caused more than 360 deaths worldwide since it was found in humans in 2003.
Falk Huettmann, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Alaska's Fairbanks campus, uses ESRI software to track the spread of the highly contagious H5N1 bird flu virus.
Past experiments have shown it to make viruses -- including the H5N1 bird flu virus -- more likely to infect ferrets, which are commonly used in flu research.
Recall that the so-called Center for Disease Control is where the capitalists brag in the March 23, 2005 Wall Street Journal that they created their human-to-human strain of the H5N1 Bird Flu virus.
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This is less deadly than the previous avian flu outbreak in China six years ago (that H5N1 bird flu virus killed more than 300 people after spreading from China to other countries in 2006).
His group will attempt to nail down exactly how many mutations - and which - are sufficient to make the H5N1 avian flu virus airborne, and whether these particular mutations can also make other bird flu viruses airborne.
The H5N1 strain of the virus was found in China back in 2003.
It has already spread to the edges of the European Union: last month, the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus was confirmed in poultry in Turkey and Romania.
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Flavonoids and flu: Two plant-based flavonoids disease-fighting compounds found in many foods significantly impaired the infectious activity of H5N1 avian-flu virus in laboratory experiments and may form the basis of future influenza treatments, a report in Antiviral Research says.
But the virus doesn't appear to notably sicken infected birds, unlike H5N1, another avian-flu virus that is deadly in birds and occasionally infects people.
Citigroup's March report, entitled "Avian Flu: Science, Scenarios and Stock Ideas, " creates a road map for investors should the virus, also known as H5N1, evolve into a form that can spread between humans.
The authorities appear to have learned the lessons of previous deadly virus outbreaks such as the H5N1 avian flu and Sars (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), and this time around have been quick to share information with the WHO.
Experts fear that as the number of humans infected with the H5N1 strain increases, the opportunity for the virus to mutate also grows.
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Another challenge is that unlike H5N1, which can kill birds, this H7N9 virus doesn't make birds very ill so there is little sign it is spreading in flocks.
But he said that based on the evidence, "this virus is more easily transmissible from poultry to humans than H5N1", a strain which spread in 2003.
Having had close calls with both SARS and H5N1, the world is watching and waiting to see if this new virus possesses the combination of infectiousness and lethality that made those two diseases such a worry.
Two tests on the woman were positive for H5N1 avian influenza, but the government did not say how she might have contracted the virus.
H5N1 flu hasn't been reported in the U.S., but the virus has infected more than 600 people in other countries and appears to be resistant to traditional anti-viral treatments, researchers said.
Making the virus hard to detect is that infected poultry display slight or no symptoms, unlike the H5N1 strain which kills birds and raged across the region in the middle of the last decade.
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