Karen Greendale here at AMBI pointed me to this piece that suggests a heritable susceptibility to H5N1:
With four cases confirmed or suspected, her family represents one of the largest clusters of bird flu among humans in the world. It is also notable in sharing a characteristic with nearly all the other family clusters: Those infected by the virus were related to each other by blood and not by marriage. This raises the possibility that genetics play a role in determining who among those exposed contracts the often-lethal disease.
“It’s intriguing,” said Sonja J. Olsen of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Bangkok, who has studied family clusters of avian influenza. If a biological explanation were ultimately proved, she added, “perhaps we could identify people at genetic risk.”
Now, if it is possible to identify those en masse who have such a susceptibility, should they be quarantined first?
And just in case that doesn’t confuse things enough – word of a vaccine that might really work.