There is no need to panic.
Not yet anyway and hopefully never.
Masaki Imai et. al. report in a 9 September 2017 article in the journal
Cell Host & Microbe on how low pathogenic H7N9 influenza viruses
have recently evolved to become highly pathogenic.
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
are keeping close tabs on H7N9 because of its pandemic potential.
See
http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/progra...on_update.html
It's an avian virus found in poultry in China.
From February 2013 to 23 August 2017, there were 1,589 laboratory-confirmed
human cases of avian influenza H7N9 infection, with a fatality rate of approximately 39%.
Yet to spread human to human, Imai et. al. report that when one strain
isolated from a human was introduced to ferrets in a laboratory
(ferrets are commonly used as human models for human influenza transmission) that it proved
lethal to some of the ferrets when they were infected by respiratory droplets.
Immunologists have been working on candidate vaccines for humans for some
time, whilst other teams work on candidate vaccines for poultry.
See :-
https://www.healio.com/infectious-di...an-cases-spike
Since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic infected 500 million people and
killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million (3% to 5% of the world's
population), virologists have been warning of the risks of a major
global pandemic for some time.
Now armed with technologies such as DNA sequencing, we are better
armed today than what we were in 1918. Hopefully we will never see
an event of that scale again but a lot of people are working hard
behind the scenes to try and help us avoid it.
Article here :-
http://www.cell.com/cell-host-microb...128(17)30396-7
