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Hong Kong authorities have slaughtered thousands of chickens and quarantined
farms to try to stamp out the third outbreak of avian flu in five years. As
New Scientist went to press, the flu strain was not thought to pose the
same threat as the 1997 outbreak that killed six people. “The virus doesn’t have
the pathogenic genes found in 1997, but it is evolving at a fairly rapid rate,”
warns Ken Shortridge of Hong Kong University. Infectious-disease experts are
concerned that Hong Kong’s live fowl markets could provide the cauldron the
virus needs to transmogrify into forms that can trigger…