Public health researchers are sounding the alarm about a disease that could spark a new pandemic, one that has been lurking on thousands of farms for months.
Researchers who study how diseases emerge and spread warn that we may not even realize that the United States has passed the stage where bird flu has turned into a human pandemic due to poor surveillance.
The new strain of the virus is called avian influenza H5N1 (H5N1), and it has now been detected on every continent except Australia; it has even been detected in Antarctic penguins and Middle Eastern ostriches.
