Who cares about bird flu?

Well, not many people do care! It's just not a problem for most people right now. I mean, if you live in Turkey and have a turkey farm you might be worried. It is the bird flu after all, and it kills a lot of birds. In fact, when bird flu is found in a poultry farm, they "dispose of" a lot of birds that might have been exposed just to make sure it doesn't spread.

The scary part is that over the last few years, bird flu has killed an increasing number of people. Every now and then a lone virus makes its way into a person, but then it dies out before it can figure out how to infect other people. There are a couple ways it could do that: it could figure it out gradually on its own (genetic drift, in technical terms) or it could swap some genes with a flu strain that is already good at moving between people, like our seasonal flu (this would be genetic shift).

So, why worry? Well, right now it's not a big deal to most of the world. The cases in humans are in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, China, and Azerbaijan, so if you're not living there you're probably not worried. But it's really just a matter of time before bird flu goes Godzilla on us all.