Milk, reservoirs and spillovers: Bird flu in cows

On 26 April my sister emailed me from the United States and said “I might have to go over to oat milk”. She was alarmed by reports that bits of bird flu virus had been found in pasteurised milk. She has not gone over to oat milk yet. It seems that there is almost no …

Bird flu – then and now

Current news about a world-wide bird flu outbreak brought back memories of 2005, dubbed then “The year of bird flu”. In an article I co-authored that year with Christopher Halliday, we noted that “[l]ately, fear of disease has been fuelled yet again by the emergence of a new highly pathogenic virus strain of avian influenza …