Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have found key features that distinguish influenza viruses found in birds from those that infect humans.

Ukraine has almost completed clinical trials for a bird flu vaccine, the head of the Ukrainian State Veterinarian Department said Thursday. Since 2003, when bird flu first hit countries in Asia, international experts feared the virus could mutate into a form that spread easily among people, sparking a global pandemic.

The United Nations is taking steps to promote the application of space technology to help Asian-Pacific countries fight bird flu, drawing on its potential as part of an integrated early-warning system to track the virus’s path in a region that has suffered by far the largest share of both human and avian infections in the world.

French authorities say two dead swans have tested positive for the H5N1 strain of bird flu in northeastern France. It is the second outbreak of the deadly virus in the area in recent weeks.

As workers began slaughtering 150,000 chickens near a farm where a deadly bird flu virus was found, health in India's remote northeast went house-to-house searching for sick people Thursday.

Researchers from the U.S. and abroad used a contact ferret model to evaluate transmissibility of influenza viruses in humans and found that some strains currently circulating throughout the world may transmit better than others in mammals. The researchers report their findings in the July 2007 issue of the Journal of Virology.

A six-year-old Indonesian boy died from bird flu over the weekend in a local hospital, bringing the country's death toll from the disease to 81, a local news agency reported Monday.

French authorities have confirmed that the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu killed three swans in eastern France, in the country's first outbreak of the disease in more than a year.

Russia's food safety watchdog said Wednesday it was ready to help Egypt fight the spread of a deadly bird flu virus, including supplying the country with a vaccine developed in Russia.

Tests confirmed that hundreds of turkeys in Eastern Czech Republic died of the H5N1 bird flu virus. It was the first time the virus was detected among poultry in the Czech Republic, said Zbynek Semerad, a spokesman for the Czech veterinary authority.

Amid heightened concern over a possible epidemic of bird flu in humans, scientists in the United States and Taiwan are reporting critical new insights into the architecture of a key enzyme in the H5N1 avian influenza virus that enables the virus to spread.

In this week's BMJ, a senior doctor advises caution over the use of the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu).