Following recent avian flu outbreaks in Africa and Eurasia, the head of China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention last week urged stricter surveillance in poultry farms, markets and wild birds.
While it was bats earlier, this time the virus said to have originated from poultry has triggered a sense of fear even though China has maintained that the case reported is 'rare' and that chances of large-scale spread are very bleak.
Evidence suggests that the flu strain that caused the 1918 pandemic, H1N1, also came from birds, refuting some older studies that suggested it originated from a mix of human and swine viruses,.