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Is Bird Flu Waiting to Explode? (preview)

Scientific American - Posted: July 15th, 2012, 8:00am EDT

pThe chickens were already getting sick when Yoshihiro Kawaoka arrived in the U.S. in August 1983. A few months before, in April, a bird flu virus had arisen in the poultry farms of eastern Pennsylvania, but veterinarians had deemed it to be ldquo;low pathogenicrdquo;--meaning it made chickens sick but did not kill many of them. As the virus swept through the poultry farms, however, a new strain developed. Chickens began to die in large numbers, and farmers started to fear for their livelihoods. The state called in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which set up a temporary command and control center in a strip mall outside of Lancaster. To contain the epidemic, it culled 17 million birds from Pennsylvania down through Virginia./p a href=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bird-flu-waiting-to-explode[More]/a

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