This is unfortunate.

Last Friday, a health alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pinged its way across the inboxes of clinicians and state health departments all over the US. The message described how a dairy farm worker in Texas had contracted H5N1, the highly infectious strain of avian influenza, or bird flu, that’s currently circling worldwide. The dairy worker had caught the virus, apparently, from cattle.

The CDC’s alert urged doctors to be vigilant and consider H5N1 a possibility in any patients presenting with acute respiratory symptoms or sore eyes who had recently been in contact with animals.

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So far, the public health threat from H5N1 has been minimal because it cannot easily enter the cells of the human nose and mouth, though when the virus does infect people, it can be deadly.

“The virus is not one that can transmit easily between humans,” says MacIntyre. “The key event that could result in a human pandemic is a mutation that switched the affinity of the virus to certain receptors in the human respiratory tract.”