A new flu is spilling over from cows to people in the U.S. How worried should we be?

By Michaeleen Doucleff

In 2011, a farmer in Oklahoma had a bunch of sick pigs. The animals had what looked like the flu.

“Just like a person with respiratory disease, the pigs had labored breathing, maybe a runny nose, cough and potentially a fever,” says virologist Benjamin Hause.

At the time, Hause was working at the company Newport Laboratories, which develops custom vaccines for livestock. “We would detect and isolate pathogens from animals. Then we would grow the pathogens in the lab, kill them and formulate vaccines,” says Hause, who’s now an executive at Cambridge Technologies, another vaccine company.

Read more…