A bird flu pandemic could be “100 times worse than Covid” and kill up to half of all the people it infects, experts have warned, as the White House says it is “monitoring” the situation.
In a briefing, virus researchers said the H5N1 strain of bird flu could be “dangerously close” to triggering a pandemic.
Multiple cases of infection in a variety of mammals, including cows, cats and, more recently, humans, are increasing the risk of the virus mutating to become more transmissible, they said.
But others attending the briefing said it was too early to panic because there were still too many unknowns about the recent cases to justify sounding the alarm.
A White House representative said today that it was tracking bird flu in the United States, adding: “We take the health and safety of the American people seriously.”
The above shows how bird flu is approaching human contagion in the US.
The panel was quickly convened following news that a dairy farm worker in Texas tested positive for the virus, along with 12 herds of cows in six states and three cats also in Texas that subsequently died.
Tests on the worker showed that the patient’s virus had already mutated to spread more easily, although the CDC said this mutation had been recorded before, the risk was low and there were no signs of human-to-human transmission.
The briefing was attended by bird flu researchers, doctors and officials from government agencies who were alarmed by the case of bird flu in a human.
John Fulton, a vaccine consultant to the pharmaceutical industry and founder of the Canadian pharmaceutical company BioNiagara, organized the meeting after receiving inquiries from the media.
Speaking at the briefing, Dr. Suresh Kuchipudi, a bird flu researcher in Pittsburgh, warned: ‘This virus (has been) at the top of the pandemic list for many, many years and probably decades.
“And now we are getting dangerously close to this virus causing a pandemic.”
And he added: “The H5N1 viruses have already demonstrated several important characteristics of a potential pandemic virus.
“The virus is already distributed globally, and this particular virus, which is often perceived as an avian virus, can, and has demonstrated, the ability to infect a variety of mammalian hosts, including humans.
«Actually, we are not talking about a virus that has not yet made a leap, we are talking about a virus that is present throughout the world, that already infects a series of mammals and that is circulating.
“So, in my opinion, I think this is a virus that has the greatest pandemic threat (that is) developing in plain sight and being present globally.”
“It’s time for us to be prepared.”
The above shows H5N1 cases in people by country since 1997. The virus underwent a major change in 2020 when a wild and domestic version was combined.
Fulton echoed their concerns, warning that the H5N1 strain of influenza A could trigger a pandemic worse than Covid.
He said: “This appears to be 100 times worse than Covid, or could be if it mutates and maintains its high case fatality rate.”
“Once it mutates to infect humans, we can only hope that the (mortality rate) goes down.”
The World Health Organization estimates the mortality rate from H5N1 at 52 percent, based on the 462 deaths recorded since 2003 among the 887 people diagnosed with the virus.
By comparison, Covid currently kills less than 0.1 percent of the people it infects, although at the beginning of the pandemic that figure was around 20 percent.
Since 2020, when the new strain of bird flu emerged and spread around the world, seven in 26 people infected with H5N1 have died, or nearly 30 percent.
Some experts warn that in more serious but rare cases, H5N1 could infect the respiratory tract causing pneumonia. It can also infect other areas, such as the eyes, where it causes inflammation.
Dr. Gabriel Girouard, a New Brunswick microbiologist, warned that the mortality rate from H5N1 was currently around 50 percent, although there were few human cases.
But he said if the virus started to spread between people, this would likely “decrease” but would still “remain high”.
Newer infectious diseases have high mortality rates because people do not yet have a defense against them, allowing the virus to evade the immune system and cause a more serious infection.
However, other experts attending the panel called for calm, including David Swayne, who has worked on bird flu infections in animals for decades.
He said: “At the moment, for livestock cases, there is no knowledge, so it is easy for alarm to be raised.”
‘There is a huge lack of knowledge that we must cover.
“Let’s look at the facts and look at them rightly, today we don’t know much because of the knowledge gaps we need to fill.”
Dr. Francois Balloux, a UK epidemiologist, added on that can affect us, except that their lives will improve. It sucks, way more than it should.
To become a pandemic, a virus must be able to easily infect humans or animals and spread between them.
But researchers have yet to establish whether the virus is now capable of spreading from one mammal to another, and studies are being carried out in infected cattle.
The White House press secretary said today, when asked about the bird flu outbreak in the United States: “This is something we are certainly monitoring.”
‘We have been, the CDC has been working and focusing on this.
‘We take the health and safety of the American people seriously. It is very important for this president. “Our top priority is keeping communities healthy, safe and informed.”
So far, 12 farms in six states have reported H5N1 infections in their cows, including five in Texas, as well as farms in New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio, Idaho and Kansas. Cow testing is also being done in Iowa.
Infected cattle are described as “lethargic”, eating less feed and producing less milk. But they are not dying from their infections.
But it’s unclear how the cows became infected, whether through exposure to infected droppings, bird carcasses or another route.
It is also unclear whether the virus is spreading between animals or if they are being infected from a single source, such as their food. Most cases nationwide have been linked to farms in Texas.
In the human case, there are also many unknowns, including how the patient became infected.
It could have been from direct contact with cows or from touching a surface contaminated with the virus and then touching their faces.
Although many mammals are being infected, experts say there is one species they are focusing on in particular: pigs.
These animals have the same receptors in their lungs as humans, meaning an outbreak among them could predict a similar episode in humans.
However, no infections are currently recorded in pigs.
However, one person in Pennsylvania was diagnosed with swine flu infection earlier this year and was hospitalized, but made a full recovery. The individual had close contact with pigs and was infected with the H1N2 strain of influenza A, slightly different from H5N1.
Scientists warn that pigs could also become infected with human and bird flu viruses at the same time, which could then swap genes (in a process called recombination) to create a new version of the virus.
However, the situation has a broader potential impact than simply causing panic, and is also likely to increase the price of milk and eggs.
Milk from infected cows cannot be sold, while egg farms have to cull all their birds when bird flu is detected, from which it takes months to recover.
This was behind the spike in egg prices in 2020, when the price of a dozen large, Grade A eggs rose from $1.72 to $3.59 over the year to November 2022.
At their peak, they reached $4.82 for a dozen eggs.
Officials say there is a very low risk of contracting bird flu from milk because almost the entire supply is pasteurized, which inactivates viruses and bacteria before the milk reaches stores.
Bird flu began to take off in 2020 after a wild bird flu MIXED genes with a version of the virus from domestic poultry.
It spread rapidly through migratory birds and was confirmed to have crossed the bird-mammal barrier for the first time in May 2021, after two fox pups in the Netherlands tested positive for the disease.
One died from the infection, while the other was euthanized due to his symptoms. The route of infection was not confirmed, but scientists said it was probably by eating the carcass of an infected bird.
In January 2022, the first case in a human being was diagnosed: Alan Gosling, 79, from the United Kingdom.