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H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
Don't give your true love a partridge, turtledoves, or (especially) French hens
Every viral replication that takes place in a human gives the virus one more chance to develop the set of mutations that makes it human-transmissible and start the next pandemic. The current situation in the US, and events such as the Canadian teen who got sick with H5N1, do suggest a higher background level of risk than normal (which would be reduced if a vaccine for cattle is licensed soon), but I'm wary of overupdating. But the biologists I talked to said people tend to overupdate on this, that evolution can do lots of weird things, and that the 1918 flu forgot to read the Evolutionary Virology textbook and actually mutated to get worse.
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