Q: Is bird flu more serious than cancer?

A:Cancer is a term used for a group of more than 100 diseases that can affect any part of the body, and is synonymous with malignant tumours and neoplasms. Cancer is currently a leading cause of death worldwide. Bird flu (or Avian influenza), on the other hand, is an emerging infectious disease that threatens public health worldwide because it is associated with severe illness and a very high death rate. Once the bird flu virus improves its transmission potential and learns to infect humans more efficiently (i.e. pass from an infected human to another human), it will result in a pandemic that can cause millions of death worldwide. Bird flu has the potential to become the leading single cause of death worldwide.