From Bird to Human
Of the diseases listed under the CDC’s Category A Biological Agents, none have the dreaded combination of extreme lethality and high communicability. One of the biggest potential bioterrorist problems facing America, however, is not yet on the Category A list; in fact, it is not even in existence yet. Some scientists are hypothesizing that some form of avian influenza, (most forms of which kill humans rapidly), may some day mutate into a variant that can be as communicable between humans as the normal flu virus is. In fact, some scientists “want to determine, in labs, whether the current bird flu can mix and match its genes with a human influenza virus,” taking from “the avian virus, genes for proteins on the virus’s surface that humans have no immunity to. From the human virus, genes conferring a deadly ability to reproduce inside human cells and to spread from person to person.” Were this possible, it could easily lead to a global pandemic which might be many times as worse as even the influenza pandemic of 1918.

Even further, some scientists want to go ahead and conduct experiments to combine (A) H5N1 and the human influenza virus in labs, in order to study the properties of such a virus; others, however, wonder about the wisdom of conducting these experiments: “Biosecurity expert Jonathan Tucker of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, Calif., calls the proposed experiment ‘extraordinarily dangerous’ with serious security implications. ‘There is a real need for a thorough scientific and policy review before it goes forward.’ The U.S. government is supposed to establish a panel to review federally funded experiments that might pose a biosecurity threat, but has not yet done so. Finally, and of no small concern, is that the results of the studies could be openly published, potentially giving terrorists a recipe for what Dr. Tucker calls ‘a super-pathogenic virus.’”

However, while some warn against the dangers of conducting such experiments, others warn against the dangers of not doing so: “Reassorted viruses caused both the 1957-1958 Asian flu pandemic, which killed 70,000 people in the U.S., and the 1968-1969 Hong Kong flu, which killed 34,000 in the U.S. Most ominously, the cataclysmic 1918-1919 flu was the result of a reassortment between a human and an avian virus, notes flu expert Richard Webby of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis. The bird-human hybrid killed an estimated 40 million people world-wide.

"Given this history, says virologist Nancy Cox of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 'We can't relax.' No basic principles predict whether a particular bird virus will recombine catastrophically with a human virus, she says; hence the need for reassortment studies, which she hopes to begin soon. The question is, what will be the price of the knowledge gained?” (Source)

How might an attack of this nature take place?
Anyone who has had the “normal” flu before can tell you that they aren’t quite sure as to how they contracted it; they think they must have gotten too close to a friend that had it, or else maybe they got it from their kid’s daycare when they went to pick little Johnny up. The problem with the flu is that it is extremely easy to spread it, and until it really hits hard, the symptoms are similar to those of sinus problems or a head cold.

Were terrorists hell-bent on spreading a new avian/human flu combination, doing so would not be a difficult matter; an aerosol attack in a crowded airport could be enough to spread the new virus to many countries at once, where people could disseminate the virus to others far in advance of government warnings about the attack.

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