Don’t be sanguine about H5N1 bird flu. It is about the closest thing ever discovered to a perfect virus for eradicating humans, except for one thing. For some unknown reason, it has never made the 5-mutation jump so that it would be easily spread from person to person, except in a lab.
Translated, this means that it reproduces in the *lower* respiratory tract (and very unusually for influenza, in some of the internal organs), instead of the *upper* respiratory tract, where it could be easily spread by coughing and sneezing. That is it.
Were it to achieve that breakthrough, the original estimates, created by epidemiologists, but suppressed by the bureaucrats at the WHO, was of 1 billion+ fatalities.
That is, it is the virus equivalent of a medium sized nuclear world war.
Like I said, it is a near perfect virus for killing people.
And it could achieve that mutation at any time, or not.
There is always a viral mutation that could lead to the Armageddon virus. HIV could easily become spread by respiratory droplet if the right envelope protein mutations occurred. The reality is that even most often those mutations that would lead to the most virulence also lead to the least ‘fitness’ for the virus, and therefore are not selected for. Maybe we're just lucky. I'm not being flippant about this, but I do great issue with hype.
I stand by what I said about silly British academic pretentiousness.