eat your kimchi, little birdie?

Scientists at Seaoul National University in Korea fed kimchi juice to 13 chickens infected by the nasty H5N1 avian influenza. Eleven of them survived. And now kimchi sales at an Asian grocery in northern Virginia are way up.

A mortality rate of 15% (2 out of 13) sounds pretty bad... but the Center for Disease Control says the rate can approach 90%, so IF there is any connection between kimchi and surviving the bird flu, that might be interesting.

If you can believe any life-science-connected news coming out of Korea nowadays, that is... Maybe the researchers were spiking the kimchi with Tamiflu!