IT ISN’T just flu that we have birds to thank for over the millennia. It seems they also gave us one kind of common cold – and it made the jump relatively recently.
In 2001 Ron Fouchier and colleagues at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, discovered human metapneumovirus, one of many viruses that cause common colds. Although the resulting illness is usually mild, and most children have had it at least once by the age of 5, hMPV can cause lethal lung infections in small children.
By analysing similar viruses in birds, Fouchier’s team has worked out that…
