re: Russia tells WHO it has detected first case of avian flu strain in humans

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Details? I’m ignorant on this flu.

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Avian flus have caused some of the worst pandemics in the history of humans. H1N1 may have killed 100 million people in 1918-1919 when it was a novel strain in the human population. That equates to about 600 million in our population today.

They don’t normally spread directly from birds to humans. They usually infect another animal such as a pig which has also been infected with a human flu virus. The two then intermingle and can produce a very lethal strain for humans.

If that happens, COVID-19 will seem mild by comparison. A novel avian flu virus kills young people far more than older adults who have experienced other flu strains and vaccines and have better immune responses to it.

A vaccine could be hurriedly produced to fight it but in the meantime hundreds of millions of people might die in a population of nearly 8 billion.