hello becky,
swine flu and bird flu's have been around for a long time.
in fact there's a number of different strains of both.
(PsychoChomp, Mon 20 Jul 2009, 23:04, 1 reply, 16 years ago)

Just to add some more info to this,
The 1918 spanish flu (the one famous for killing more people than the war which it followed) was an avian flu, and the first recorded cases of flu in swine (or at least of a strain being shared between swine and humans, though in this case we probably gave it to them) were during this outbreak.
The current H1N1 swine flu is a descendant of the 1918 flu (in as much as this applies to virii, since the genetics can get rather strange at times), though considerably less deadly (by a factor of about 50). The major panic is that it *could* mutate to become more deadly, and then we're buggered (this is what happened in 1918)
( Tedium Alduce me to interlow myself., Mon 20 Jul 2009, 23:25, Reply)