The United States still has no licensed vaccine to prevent avian flu and has nowhere near enough drugs to treat the sick if there is an epidemic, experts told Congress on Thursday.

Hospitals have too little capacity to deal with the huge numbers of people who would become sick and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department does not have a plan for dealing with an epidemic, the experts said

Christina Ficara - All Headline News Staff Reporter

A Rhode Island woman is thought to have caught the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) from her hamster shortly before her unrelated death last month

China has isolated it's nature reserves and sent more than 3 million doses of bird flu vaccine to a remote western province after migratory birds were found dead from the H5N1 strain of bird-flu.

Poultry across far-flung Qinghai province, neighboring Tibet and Xinjiang, had become the "target of a compulsory vaccination campaign", reportedthe China Daily newspaper story

The World Health Organization is concerned that a deadly strain of bird flu, that has already killed more than 50 people in Asian countries might mutate into a form that can be passed from one person to another and create a global pandemic.

WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley says so far there is no conclusive proof of human-to-human transmission. "We have found a couple of cases that were very suspicious, but we couldn't actually hammer that nail home

According to a recent report on the situation in Angola, the death toll from the Marburg virus outbreak is now 292, out of the 336 known cases.

WHO spokesperson Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, in a phone interview with Reuters said, "We've seen new cases in new municipalities that don't have obvious links to earlier cases of Marburg. We are very concerned about the situation