Carole Heilman, PhD
Director, Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, NIAID
National Institutes of Health
In 1997 we first began seeing H5N1 but then it died out and so we didn't see anything again. And then as we were looking again at surveillance, you saw some other Avian flues popping up in different places on occasions, so for example, we had an H7. We also had an H9 and we also had an H10. But in each one of those cases, although they popped up, and we did pay good attention to it, they died out naturally. The importance for the H5 is again, as I mentioned, we saw it in 1997, but we saw it again in 2003, in 2004 and 2005. And that's the part that worries us the most about the H5.
