News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Hong Kong health officials raised the pandemic influenza response level from alert to serious today after one of the local hospitals confirmed an H5 infection in a boy from China's Guandong province.

(CIDRAP News) – The first of two controversial H5N1 avian influenza studies to see print suggests that just four mutations in one of the virus's surface proteins may be enough to equip it to spread among mammals, but the findings are freighted with qualifiers.

(CIDRAP News) – A new laboratory study supports the long-debated view that airborne viruses play a role in spreading influenza and that N95 respirators provide the best protection against airborne viruses, with surgical masks affording much less.

(CIDRAP News) – The fatality rate for officially confirmed human cases of H5N1 avian influenza infection is a stunningly high 59% (345 deaths in 584 cases). But the current controversy over publishing data about transmissible H5N1 viruses has revived a debate about whether the virus is as lethal as those numbers say.

(CIDRAP News) – In the influenza literature, it's a given that ferrets are the best animal model for influenza in humans. They show similar clinical signs of disease, such as fever, coughing, and sneezing, and flu viruses that spread among humans usually spread in ferrets as well.