BIRD flu can be fatal in humans, but it is also quite hard to catch – and the reason for both lies deep in our lungs.
Bird flu infects birds, and human flu infects humans, when the virus binds to a sugar molecule on the surface of the host’s cells – a different sugar for the two kinds of viruses. This week Yoshihiro Kawaoka and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that while cells in our noses, throats and lungs have only the sugar that matches human flu, we also have the “bird” sugar on cells in the alveoli, the…
