over 30 years since the last one and so most peopl, page-17

dont ignore h5n1 alla tsunami Inside London's maximum security "containment four" facility, British scientists have been studying samples of the influenza virus, which in 1918 swept the world, killing millions, young and old alike.

Using a technique known X-ray crystallography, the scientists from Britain's National Institute for Medical Research, examined the virus, isolating the spiky proteins called hemagglutinins that allow the virus to bind to receptors on the cells in the bodies of birds.

Normally, humans aren't infected by bird flu because the hemagglutinins bind with different receptors in our bodies, but the British research team have created a three dimensional picture of the proteins from 1918's so-called "Spanish flu," and demonstrated that they had to undergo only minor mutations in their structure in order to bind with both human and bird cells.

The species jump from birds to humans then occurred.