Flight H5N1 is approaching Britain. Brace for impact
By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
(Filed: 21/08/2005)

When doctors announced the deaths of some people in Hong Kong from a new form of flu in 1997, it made few headlines. Something called Avian Influenza A(H5N1) had apparently spread from chickens to humans in the city's teeming backstreets, infecting 18 people and killing six before vanishing. The jump across the species barrier was a surprise, but the outbreak seemed like a storm in a distant teacup.

But now the same virus has turned up at the threshold of Europe. Last week Russian scientists revealed that thousands of domestic birds around the Chelyabinsk region of the Ural mountains had perished after contracting H5N1, which had apparently been transported there by migrating birds.

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