What are the symptoms of avian influenza in humans?

Dr. Anthony Fauci

Director, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease

You get the typical flu-like symptoms of high fever, headache, muscle aches, prostration; but you also get, in many of the cases, a rapidly advancing lung and pulmonary involvement where you have respiratory tract disease, difficulty breathing, and that is generally the cause of death, or a contributing cause of death among those people who’ve actually died from avian flu.  So it has some of the standard flu-like symptoms, but it rapidly assumes a very fulminate course, leading to the severe illness and sometimes death of individuals.