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Advocating a watch-and-prepare approach with avian influenza

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The global outbreak of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus and its high toll on animal populations raise concerns about spillover into humans, but human host barriers need to be considered when estimating transmission potential.

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Fig. 1: Emergence and evolution of the H5 HPAIV lineage.

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Acknowledgements

The work was funded by a grant from the European Research Council to M.S. (no. 882631—Bat Flu); grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to M.S. (SCHW 632/16-1) and M.B. (BE 5187/4-2); the EU Horizon 2020 program grant agreement VEO (no. 874735) to M.B.; and the medical faculty at the University of Freiburg through the Hans A. Krebs Medical Scientist Programme to K.C.

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Correspondence to Kevin Ciminski, Geoffrey Chase, Martin Schwemmle or Martin Beer.

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Nature Microbiology thanks Richard Webby and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Ciminski, K., Chase, G., Schwemmle, M. et al. Advocating a watch-and-prepare approach with avian influenza. Nat Microbiol 8, 1603–1605 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01457-0

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