The flu season is fading away, but experts warn that a far greater menace may be on the horizon: The avian flu galloping across Asia poses “the most serious pandemic threat since 1968,” Keiji Fukuda said Monday at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases. A pandemic caused by a flu strain that is new, deadly to humans and highly contagious “is inevitable,” he said, but no one knows when it may strike. “We’ve seen an accelerated number of near-misses,” especially since 1997 when the first cases of direct transmission of flu viruses from birds to humans occurred in Hong Kong. A flu pandemic could kill more than 200,000 people in the USA, according to new computer modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Full Story