Description

Epidemiologists and other public health experts are currently tracking several potential flu pandemics, the Avian Influenza, or Bird Flu, appears to pose the most lethal threat. As of March, Avian Flu had killed 74 people in Asian and tens of millions of birds. The global threat is a potential for the virus to mutate and spread from human to human. The World Health Organization has said that because of that possibility the world is ‘‘closer to an influenza pandemic than in any time since 1968.’’ WHO further points out similarities that suggest Avian Flu could follow the same patterns as the strain that caused the 1918 pandemic.