Yesterday the Tennessee department of agriculture announced the outbreak of HPAI avian flu, and identified it as an H7 strain. Today the US Department of Agriculture reports that the outbreak seems to have been contained, and we should know the precise strain by sometime Tuesday.
So I dug around in Wikipedia and found no fewer than six varieties of H7 known to infect poultry. Little seems known about H7N1. H7N2 gained recent notoriety when cats in a New York animal shelter contracted it. H7N3 has been found in both Canada and Mexico (in 2004, it nearly destroyed the poultry industry in the Fraser Valley, Vancouver's back yard—and got me interested in the subject of avian flu). H7N7 caused a serious outbreak in the Netherlands in 2003, infecting 89 people and killing one. H7N8 caused devastation in US turkey farms last year. And H7N9 came out of nowhere four years ago to become a major problem in China.
H7N8 seems the likeliest to be identified as the cause of this outbreak. But if it turns out to be H7N9, we'll be in for a "wait, what?" moment.
