Quotes About H5N1

With genetic manipulation you could quite easily create an efficiently transmittable version of H5N1. Swap a human receptor binding domain from a human flu virus into an H5 backbone and you'd improve transmission efficiency enormously. The last couple of years, they've been doing that in labs all over the world to try to anticipate what a human transmissible H5N1 would look like.

As long as H5N1 is out there in the world," Webster said, "there is the possibility of disaster. That's really the bottom line with H5N1. So long as it's out there in the human population, there is the theoretical possibility that it can acquire the ability to transmit human-to-human." He paused. "And then God help us.

course, if developing a universal vaccine were easy it would have been done, but for decades few resources went to such research. Consider for a moment that prior to the emergence of H5N1, the U.S. government was spending more money on the West Nile virus than on influenza. While influenza was killing as many as 56,000 Americans a year, West Nile in its deadliest year killed 284.