Free Republic

Week of Dec. 16, 2006; Vol. 170, No. 25 , p. 390 Catching Flu's Drift: Vaccines fight unexpected influenza Ben Harder Vaccination can prevent three of every four flu infections, even when the vaccines are imperfectly tailored to block the common wintertime pathogens, a new study shows. That finding is reassuring, researchers say, because it's difficult to anticipate how the flu virus will evolve each year during the time from the start of vaccine manufacture to deployment. The flu reinvents itself from year to year through a process in which previously rare variants of the virus supplant once-dominant ones. Since...

Bird flu's 'risk to biodiversity' By Helen Briggs BBC News science reporter The Owston's civet is prized by bushmeat restaurants The spread of bird flu poses serious risks to biodiversity, say scientists who have detailed an outbreak of the virus in Owston's civets. The mammal is a small, endangered carnivore that lives in the forests of Vietnam, Laos and southern China. Three animals died at a conservation centre in northern Vietnam last summer. It is not known how they contracted the virus, as they do not eat poultry. The scientists report the cases in a journal of the UK's Royal...

Bird flu's human-attack pathway revealed 18:00 22 March 2006 NewScientist.com news service Debora MacKenzie Two separate research groups have independently discovered why the H5N1 bird flu virus causes lethal pneumonia in people, but is – so far – hard for people to catch. In the process, they have found a way to predict which mutations might make the virus more contagious, and potentially become a pandemic strain. To date, confirmed human deaths from the disease stand at 103 worldwide The H5N1 virus binds to sugars on the surface of cells deep in human lungs, but not to cells lining the...

Flu's deadly numbers game A new pandemic looming, says Ian Sample and it's not just humans at risk Thursday January 29, 2004 The Guardian (UK) The nets being pegged up over chicken farms in Singapore are not to stop the birds making a break for freedom. The worry is what lurks outside the enclosures. Farmers fear wild birds could land among their chickens, and spread the latest strain of avian flu to throw Asia into turmoil. The virus has already forced South Korea and Vietnam to order mass cullings of domestic birds in the hope of thwarting the spread of...