ECDC on air.

The podcast of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Keeping up to date with European epidemiology.

My name is Nicholas and I'm your host for today's ECDC on Air podcast,

which is recorded from my headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden.

In this episode, you will learn more from my expert,

Cornelia Adelhock, about avian flu,

what the threat is to humans,

and how best you can protect yourself from getting infected. Hello, Cornelia. Thanks for coming here today to ECDC on air. And you're here to speak to us today about avian flu.

Yes. Good afternoon. It's nice to be here thank you for the invitation so you've been working here at eccdc for a while how many years have

you been here for more than eight years now and as i understand you're the person here at

ecdc working specifically with avian flu, I have originally a background being a veterinarian

before then also becoming epidemiology. So then I'm combining kind of the seasonal influenza

with the sonotic side of the flu world. Okay, so can you tell me then a little bit about avian flu?

It's a zoonotic disease classified as something that comes from animals and

infects humans. But how does it compare to, let's say, what we call the normal flu, like seasonal

flu? So the avian flu is an influenza virus that infects birds. So you can also call it bird flu as a

lay name. It transmits between birds, but it has also the capacity

in very rare occasions to jump to humans and infect humans. And it has also the capacity to mix

with other viruses, influenza viruses coming from swine, coming also from humans, and then

creating very new viruses which are then

able to create pandemics as we have seen in the past and when we talk about the symptoms is it the

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