Is bird flu considered armed and dangerous?

Answer 1

Yes. It is armed and dangerous but, thankfully, it doesn't do well with transport and logistics. 50 - 60 % of those who contract avian flu (bird flu) die of the viral infection. So it is armed to the hilt. But it doesn't spread easily from human to human.

As we know, H1N1/09 Swine Flu traveled the world in short order to become a pandemic, with every nation impacted. Bird flu, H5N1, is still a rare form of influenza in humans, and so far there have been only a few cases that transferred from person to person, and then only through very close contact. It is spread to humans by wild birds and poultry, and their saliva or feces. It has remained, so far, in a rather small portion of the world, infectious disease organizations, like the World Health Organization (WHO) track this disease carefully.

Now, talking of armed and dangerous, consider if there were to be a reassortant (mutation) that combined H5N1 bird flu and H1N1 swine flu together! That was a concern of epidemiologists when the "easily transferred from person to person H1N1" began to rapidly spread to locations with history of avian flu. If these viruses mutated together, they could form a virus capable of very fast spread along with extremely high mortality rates.