But as unnerving as H5N1's current spread in cows might be, 'I would be a whole lot more concerned if this was an event in pigs,' Richard Webby, the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds, told me.
If there's a list of riskiest animals for an avian flu to infiltrate, 'pigs are clearly at the top,' Webby said.
For the virus to spread widely in humans, scientists think that it would need to pick up several new traits; so far, they've detected only one such modification, which has boosted the virus's ability to replicate inside mammalian cells.
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