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Pick up a newspaper, turn on the TV and it’s there: the news about avian flu. It can be alarming sometimes, often confusing. And nearly everyone has the same question: Could it happen here? In 1996, a new and particularly deadly strain of avian flu was found in a goose in China. It was found a year later in Hong Kong and six people died from the virus. They were the first known human cases.

Concerns rise that human infection in Gaza a possibility as Gazan farmers refuse to cull flocks, fearing financial losses. Hours after Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni appealed to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday for international assistance to help the Palestinians fight the recent outbreak of the deadly bird flu, Palestinian officials confirmed an outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu at a second farm in the Gaza Strip on Friday. In response, Annan told Livni in their phone conversation that he would call on the World Health Organization to lend support to Palestinian agriculture and health officials in their...

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...

Scare headlines about the possibility of a deadly flu pandemic have been with us for a few years now, ever since the H5N1 bird-flu virus that first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997 resurfaced in the region in 2003. But in the past month the drumbeat of such stories has grown faster and louder: Avian Flu Arrives in Poland. Turkey. Azerbajian. Germany. Denmark. And, just last Friday, Israel. The good news, according to Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, is that the arrival of infected birds in North America—sometime...

The CP interview: Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy talks about the flu bug that could bring the world to its knees. BY STEVE PERRY3-22-2006 Scare headlines about the possibility of a deadly flu pandemic have been with us for a few years now, ever since the H5N1 bird-flu virus that first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997 resurfaced in the region in 2003. But in the past month the drumbeat of such stories has grown faster and louder: Avian Flu Arrives in Poland. Turkey. Azerbajian. Germany. Denmark. And, just last...