Tracking the bird flu, experts see a familiar threat — and a virus whose course is hard to predict

Tracking the bird flu, experts see a familiar threat — and a virus whose course is hard to predict While scientists who have been studying H5N1 bird flu for a couple of decades have a very healthy respect for it, a number are hedging their bets about what the virus's future path will look like. Helen Branswell STAT

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STAT asked a number of experts, all of whom have been studying or following H5N1 for years, how they assess the current situation and how they’d describe their individual level of concern.

None of them ever stopped worrying about H5N1. None of them like what they’re seeing now. But most of them struggled to answer when asked if they are more worried now than earlier. Like in 2004, when a cluster of cases in a Vietnamese family raised the specter of limited person-to-person spread. Or 2005, when what was by then a poultry virus moved back into wild birds, which spread it to North Africa, Turkey and Europe. Or in the mid-to-late teens, when Egypt recorded more than 250 human cases in unsettling succession, 93 of them fatal.

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