Wickham's musings from Chalke

 
Asian flu type H5N1 has been infecting chickens and other poultry. Humans have been catching it from live and dead chickens and also feathers and dust.

It has killed about seventy people so far, mainly in Asian countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Korea and Indonesia which have poor people living in close proximity to chickens. Widespread slaughter of poultry is being carried out, but these people are so poor they rely on poultry for food so they are hiding them.

Recently the flu infected poultry in western Russia, Romania and eastern Turkey. There has been a large outbreak in Dogubeyazit where fifty humans were infected and some have died. There was also a case at Heathrow Airport's animal quarantine centre of a South American parrot which probably caught the flu from adjacent imported Asian small birds. All were destroyed and the flu did not escape.

The danger is twofold. First, the flu will probably spread further west, carried by migrating birds although contact with infected wild birds and poultry is less close in the West so the risk to humans may be less.

The second danger is that if someone with ordinary flu (common at this time of year) gets Asian flu as well, the two might combine into a form transmitted from human to human as well as being deadly.