Influenza: Five questions on H5N1

This week saw the publication of the second of two papers identifying mutations that give H5N1 the ability to spread through the air between ferrets. The papers, the latest¹ from a group led by Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the earlier one² by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues, have been controversial because they offer what some see as a recipe for disaster — that they increase the risk of accidental or intentional release of a deadly human pathogen. But what is most unsettling about them, say many in the flu community, is the evidence they provide that the wild virus could spark a pandemic on its own. That threat makes the outstanding scientific mysteries about this tiny RNA virus — its genome just 14,000 letters long — even more pressing. Here are five of the biggest puzzles, and what researchers are doing to solve them.

via Nature News