Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

12 million Ukrainians could be infected with flu by end of 2010. After bne's initial scepticism about the severity of the flu outbreak in Ukraine, things have taken a turn for the worse.

It seems the virus that's on the loose in Ukraine has mutated into a more virulent form, says the World Heath Organisation (WHO). bne was commissioned to write a report on the bird flu virus a few years ago by the WHO and attended the scientific conferences in the Hague ahead of the political meetings to coordinate a response a few months later in Geneva. The scientists then warned that the danger of these viruses was not the current form, which can kill though isn't particularly lethal, but the fact that this family of "animal" viruses are very unstable and can easily mutate into more contagious and deadly forms; in order to jump across the species divide, the virus has to be almost by definition unstable if it is to be able to adapt itself to attack first an avian or porcine host and then move into humans. Once in humans, the virus continues to adapt and while the avian version never changed into a form that did much damage, the porcine virus seems to have mutated into a more contagious form in Ukraine, albeit not particularly deadly yet. Read the story here.