Last Friday, a health alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pinged its way across the inboxes of clinicians and state health departments all over the US. The message described how a dairy farm worker in Texas had contracted H5N1, the highly infectious strain of avian influenza, or bird flu, that’s currently circling worldwide. The dairy worker had caught the virus, apparently, from cattle.
The CDC’s alert urged doctors to be vigilant and consider H5N1 a possibility in any patients presenting with acute respiratory symptoms or sore eyes who had recently been in contact with animals.
Around the world, virologists responded to the news with varying degrees of alarm.
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