This board is knid of useless now

I know just miss the tag teaming.

Ya you betcha, cold here too -40 WC below last night. I'm right next door to ya in Minnesota.

Actually, the evidence suggests H5N1 is more likely to "spawn" a pandemic by hybridizing with other pathogens and becoming airborne, waterborne, vectorborne, and etc and cover all the bases.

But you're right - when it hybridizes, it won't be H5N1 any more...

Just a quick update on the 2006-2007 winter flu season:

Just a point here...H5N1 is technically always changing. There are several different clades now from the original 1996 HK sequence. Thru recombination or reassortment of gene segments and small changes in or near the domain binding site, H5N1 is gaining the ability to infect and replicate in more kinds of bio-diverse environments, including the mamilian species (bad for us). The prevailing clade is the Qinghai Lake sequence that emerged in China.

H5N1 is still the main canidate for a pandemic strain. It has shown a remarkable ability to adapt from avian to mamilian cells so far and has remained viable for a longer time and has expanded it geographical range more so than other circulating viruses.

H5N1 has also aquried serveral HUMAN polymorphisms which are NOT transient in nature, as they have become fixed in the gene segments...

So I disagree here...H5N1 will still be H5N1, pandemic strain or not.

Now H2N1 or H1N1 might make a come back as a pandemic strain but they would still be H2N1 or H1N1.

Hope I got your attention. H5N1 has mine...

Exactly. The H5N1 virus is still out there and still a very real threat. Just because CNN's not going mad over the subject doesn't mean theres no pandemic around the corner.

Now since the Tamiflu vaccination/treatment has proven it's uselessness, and that we don't have a viable second solution, it can come back and surprise us all.