Home Tech The United States has vaccines against bird flu. Here’s why you can’t get one

The United States has vaccines against bird flu. Here’s why you can’t get one

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The United States has vaccines against bird flu. Here's why you can't get one

like bird flu ravaging poultry and dairy cattle across the United States, Georgia has become the latest state to detect the virus in a commercial poultry flock, and on Friday halted all poultry sales to mitigate further spread of the disease. Nationwide, egg prices are rising, if you can even find them at your local supermarket.

The current outbreak in animals has also caused at least 67 human cases of bird fluand all but one caused minor illnesses. Earlier this month, a person in Louisiana died after being hospitalized with severe bird flu in December. It is the first death recorded in the country attributed to H5N1.

The United States has previously authorized three H5N1 vaccines for humans, but they are not commercially available. The government has purchased millions of doses for the national stockpile in case they are needed. But even as the outbreak spread, President Joe Biden’s federal health officials hesitated to deploy them. Experts say the decision comes down to risk, and currently the risk of contracting H5N1 remains low. Giving a vaccine to farmworkers and others at higher risk of infection would be a more targeted tactic, but even that move may be premature. Now, with a change in federal health leadership imminent as President Donald Trump begins his second term, the decision falls to the new administration.

“Right now, from the standpoint of severity and ease of transmission, it doesn’t seem imperative to come out with a vaccine to protect humans,” says William Schaffner, a physician and professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. .

So far, no human-to-human spread of H5N1 has been identified, but health officials are monitoring the virus for any genetic changes that would make human-to-human transmission more likely. Most bird flu infections are related to exposure to animals. Of the 67 known human cases in the US, 40 have been linked to sick dairy cattle and 23 are associated with poultry farms and slaughter operations. In the other four cases, the exact source is unknown.

In the US, human cases have been mild and many of them only caused conjunctivitis. In some cases, people have had mild respiratory symptoms. Aside from the Louisiana patient, all of the people who tested positive for H5N1 recovered quickly and never needed to be hospitalized. However, H5N1 has historically been fatal in about 50 percent of cases. Since 2003, a total of 954 cases of human H5N1 have been reported to the World Health Organization, and about half of them died. Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and China have reported the highest number of human deaths from bird flu.

Those figures come with some caveats. For one thing, many of those deaths occurred in places where people live in close proximity to sick poultry. “Under those circumstances, the idea is that they probably received a very large dose of the virus,” Schaffner says.

Furthermore, the case fatality rate (the proportion of infected people who die from the disease) only takes into account known cases, and some cases of H5N1 undoubtedly go undetected in part because the symptoms of bird flu are similar to those. of other respiratory viruses. In the United States, language barriers among farmworkers, a lack of testing and workers’ reluctance to call in sick are also factors. “We probably miss more cases than we detect, and we are much more likely to detect a severe case,” says Shira Doron, director of infection control at Tufts Medicine in Boston and a hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center.

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