Anyone else following the H7N9 flu outbreak in China? I'm surprised that it isn't getting more attention because it's actually rather worrisome although we're still in the very early stages of the outbreak. Your average Chinese person is pretty worried about it already. One Chinese-American person here I know has already cancelled her trip to China in May in anticipation of trouble.

H7N9 is a bird flu, like the H5N1 bird flu that we've been warned about for almost a decade now. Like H5N1, it's highly lethal to people if you catch it. But H5N1 has remained a bird flu and is hard for people to catch. It hasn't mutated into a form that is more adapted to people, so it hasn't posed an urgent pandemic risk.

However, in a very short time, we're already seeing H7N9 strains that are adapting to people. Scientists have already experimented with H5N1 in the lab to see what kinds of genes will make a human pandemic flu, and from what I've read, wild H7N9 has already acquired one of two genes that will allow it to spread easily among people.

The outbreak started in Shanghai with a few dozen known cases, but the first case (a child) just popped up in Beijing, 600-700 miles away. Officially, there hasn't been any human-to-human transmission, but I think at least some of them were passed from human-to-human. So in a short time, H7N9 is evolving in a way that we've been dreading with H5N1 for many years.

The known numbers are small so far, but at the moment, it is 90% fatal. If it ever (and hopefully it does NOT) become easily transmissible, it can go from small numbers to exponentially increasing numbers very quickly.

H1N1 never worried me that much since it wasn't that deadly to adults in the US, but this does worry me. It's not here in the US, but might be something to be aware of down the road. We just came out of a worse than average flu season, so many of us are aware of how easily it can spread and how awful even a normal case of the flu can be.

As the weather warms up, maybe one of the best preps for this spring is to get yourself healthy with good food, lot's of sunshine (want to boost vitamin D levels from sun exposure) and physical activity to keep that immune system healthy.