Superchickens will save us

It's rare that humans catch avian influenza, or bird flu — but when they do, the disease is often deadly. Because it can spread easily from bird to bird and from human to human, the possibility of an epidemic is a worry of scientists around the world.

There's good news from Scotland, then. Researchers at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh have found a way to stop the disease from spreading among chickens. They haven't made a vaccine; instead, they've created a new kind of chicken with modified genes.

"The chickens can be infected, but they don't pass the virus on to other chickens in the flock," Professor Helen Sang, a co-author of the study, told ABC News.

Some in the health profession were less optimistic. William Schaffner, chair of preventative medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee, said, "Replacing the world's chicken population with genetically modified chickens wouldn't be cheap. It looks good on a drawing board, but it might not fly."

Sang says that because most of the world's poultry are bred by a small number of companies, this would not be hard to do. Ultimately, the success of the transgenic poultry project will depend much more on approval by safety regulators and acceptance by consumers. In other words, the disease can be stopped if no one is chicken about eating GM food.