Previously, Dr. Smeyne and his collaborator Dr. Stacey Schultz - Cherry in the Department of Infectious Disease at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, showed that a
deadly H5N1 strain of influenza (so - called Bird Flu) that has a high mortality rate (60 percent of those infected died from the disease) was able to infect nerve cells, travel to the
brain, and cause
inflammation that, the researchers showed, would later result in Parkinson's - like symptoms in mice.