Robert Webster has been chief scientific blamer of wild birds as vectors of H5N1; and yet, this recently published.
SINGAPORE — A top bird flu specialist predicted yesterday that the H5N1 virus will not reach the United States this year via migratory birds, and warned bird smuggling poses a bigger threat for transmitting the deadly disease.
Robert G. Webster, a virologist at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, said the virus will eventually arrive in the United States, possibly carried by infected birds illegally brought into the country.
”While wildlife people in the United States are watching for the appearance of this virus, I would suspect that it may not come this year,” he said, adding it has been rare for bird flu viruses to reach the Americas from Europe.
”If it doesn’t come this year, don’t relax, because it will eventually come,” said Webster, in Singapore for a two-day conference that is expected to draw leading bird flu experts.
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Webster said he is most concerned about H5N1 becoming established in the world’s wild bird populations because most highly pathogenic bird flu viruses usually do not last long in nature. They typically start in wild birds, infect domestic birds and eventually die out.
”This one has broken the rules and gone back from the domestics into the wild birds. Is it going to be perpetuated there as a killer? That’s the million-dollar question,” he said….
Smuggling a threat to carry bird flu to US, specialist says
Says migratory birds are not a concern this year
notion of a disease “being perpetuated there as a killer” is quirky.
Webster not much into natural selection, all this new-fangled evolution theory (from Darwin on) it seems.
Yes, not alone in this; seems to many people, viruses don’t evolve, they just mutate, and chance dictates outcome; I’ve even seen one guy suggestion a human pandemic could happen via magical mutation. Very odd.