How worried should we be about avian flu?
The Briefing Room
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Bird Flu Viruses - What Happens to the Birds?
Bird flu in terms of a bird issue has been known since the sort of late 1800s. People were starting to notice a disease that they called foul plague affecting their chickens and causing all their chickens to die. And we now know with hindsight this was a bird flu virus. Such outbreaks in farmed birds like chickens and turkeys have gone on all through the last century all around the world. But it was much more recently that people managed to put the clues together and realized that some of these viruses were also crossing into human pandemics.
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