Highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has increasingly spread to mammals and infected hundreds of people, raising concerns that it may lead to human-to-human transmission and turn into a new pandemic.

The detection of bird flu in a sheep is another sign that the H5N1 virus is adapting to hop to new hosts

H5N1 influenza is evolving rapidly, weakening the effectiveness of existing antibodies and increasing its potential threat to humans. Scientists at UNC Charlotte and MIT used high-performance computational modeling to analyze thousands of viral protein-antibody interactions,