It's one plane ride away from us.
It is not a matter of if a flu epidemic will occur in the U.S., it is a question of when.
The biggest known pandemic occurred in 1918-1919 killing 20 MILLION people. That was less than 100 years ago.
H5N1= bird flu strain of influenza A. The H5N1 identifies types of proteins used to identify different strains.
The real danger from this strain is if an animal (pig) gets infected with both the bird strain and a human strain at the same time. People in asia live in close proximity with farm animals (ducks, pigs) so this is an ideal place for this to occur. Anyway, when a pig gets infected with a bird and a human strain, the virus can mutate, taking attributes from the human and the duck strains and form a new strain never seen by the human immune system. This means that nobody has immunity to it, and no vaccinations will have immunized anyone for that new combination. This is the big risk from what is currently going on in Asia. And this is how they think the BIG DADDY pandemics start and is one reason why they are monitoring the situation there very closely.
A big pandemic in the U.S. could wipe out a large segment of the elderly population.