00:00What if your body's best defense against viruses just doesn't work anymore?
00:04Scientists have found that bird flu viruses can survive even when your body has a high fever,
00:09a natural defense that normally stops most viruses in their tracks.
00:13In a groundbreaking study by Cambridge and Glasgow universities,
00:17researchers discovered that while human flu dies off at high temperatures,
00:21avian flu keeps multiplying.
00:23They tested this in mice by mimicking fever conditions
00:26and saw that just a 2-degree rise was enough to stop human flu.
00:31But bird flu? It kept spreading like wildfire.
00:34The secret lies in a single gene called PB1.
00:37This gene helps avian flu resist heat.
00:40And what's scarier is that it can jump into human flu viruses, like it did in past pandemics.
00:45This heat-proof mutation could help bird flu strains become more dangerous and harder to stop.
00:50And with bird flu fatality rates in humans reaching over 40%
00:54in past cases like H5N1, the threat is very real.
00:58Experts warn that this could be the next pandemic trigger.
01:01Monitoring and testing these viral traits is now more urgent than ever.
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