Avian flu virus

Avian flu virus emerging in Asia shared some of the same genetic characteristics as the flu virus that killed more than 50 million people worldwide in 1918, shortly after the First World War, researchers have said.
The 1918 virus too had jumped directly from birds to humans, said scientists who reconstituted the 1918 virus over course of a decade using lung tissues from two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died in the pandemic.

According to the 'New York Times', the soldiers tissues had been saved in an army pathology library and the woman had been buried in permanent frozen ground.

The United Nations has repeatedly warned the countries to be prepared for the outbreak of the pandemic as the virus causing bird flu now could mutate to make human-to-human infection possible and if that happens, tens of thousands of people could die as humans would not have immunity against it.

The new findings reinforced the world body's repeated warnings and some countries now have started taking the threat seriously. The scientists who have just finished sequencing the genetic make up of 1918 flu virus, said that the Southeast Asian H5N1 virus had several of the same mutations, suggesting it might not need to combine with a flu strain already adapted to humans to cause serious infection.