The Evolution of the H5N1 Virus

The H5N1 virus that is often lethal effects seem to be tied to the difficulty it has spreading from one person to the next. If we look at what's going to take for this H5 to change from me in the duck virus to a human virus there's three groups of changes that need to occur. The seasonal ones we deal with all the time and the ones that could acquire the mutations to cross over from the wild and cause a new pandemic. This is Richard Webby, Virogest at St Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis,. One of the world health organisations global centres of excellence which track all strains of flu.