London: A new study suggests there have been multiple
clusters of human-to-human transmission in recent outbreaks of the bird
flu strain H7N9. There were around 400 human cases of H7N9
influenza and 177 deaths in 2013 and 2014, all of them in China. Most
patients are believed to have caught the infection from close contact
with birds, but the virus’s ability to spread between humans has been
uncertain. In a study published in
Emerging Infectious Diseases,
scientists from Imperial College London studied data from these
outbreaks and used statistical methods to estimate how transmissible the
virus is.