Texas bird flu case: Can humans get bird flu? How contagious is it? The avian influenza, explained.

Bird flu is, famously, a disease that infects birds. But earlier this week, federal and state authorities reported that a person in Texas had tested positive for the disease, the second person in the US to contract avian influenza in the last two years. Stranger still, the patient didn’t contract the disease from a sick chicken or wild bird but from a cow, which was presumably infected…