New Bird Flu Claims First Human Victims, Blogs Blame It On Dead River Pigs

“H7N9 bird flu is considered a low pathogenic strain that cannot easily be contracted by humans,” the AP reports from Beijing. Well that would be very comforting for humans (if not for birds), except for the sad fact that the wire story is about the first two humans known to be killed by H7N9. Another infected human is in critical condition.

But it’s supposedly a low-level virus and not the SARS kind of crazy — that virus jumped to humans from a weird kind of wildcat cruelly captured and then kept in cages to sell to bad people at markets. SARS eventually killed 775 of the 8,000 infected during that 2003 mini epidemic.

One annoying thing about Science is that it doesn’t always “connect the dots” the way the world’s bloggers are quick to do:

Many users of Chinese microblogs, known as “weibo”, said they suspected the latest outbreak of bird flu was related to more than 16,000 pig carcasses recently found dumped in rivers around Shanghai.

Why are the Red Chinese covering up the zombie river pig bird flu conspiracy?

Photo by Jimmie.