BIRD FLU—YET ANOTHER CHALLENGE FOR HUMANITY?

THE BIRD FLU VIRUS H5N1 has been  spreading around the world for two decades now. However, current assessments are that most of us have little need to worry. Those who should be concerned about H5N1 are specialist virologists, health officials, and agricultural authorities. 

The rest of us should know enough about this avian virus to make intelligent assessments of scientific progress in countering this potential deadly virus.  

There’s an extremely informative Guest Essay “How Scared Should You Be of Bird Flu?,” by Jennifer Nuzzo in The New York Times, June 19, 2024. Dr. Nuzzo is an epidemiologist and the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. 

Here are tidbits gleaned from her essay. 

Dr. Nuzzo’s Flowchart. The following summarizes her essay (and also justifies my opening paragraph).

Image from The New York Times, June 19, 2024.

My own lifestyle traces a succession of NO responses with a single MAYBE. (I’m kinda “a vegetarian except for filet mignon au bleu,” and the “undercooked meat” gives me pause.)

The SIR Model. Early on in the Covid pandemic, SimanaitisSays shared Dr. Paul Taylor’s “SIR Model”, in which the Susceptible, Infectious, and Recovered are assessed. These three terms help put H5N1 in perspective.

Susceptible. At this point, Dr. Nuzzo says, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has described the current H5N1 risk to the general public is low. The risk that the virus poses is tempered by the fact that it doesn’t spread easily among people—yet.”

This, though, is a two-edge sword: “Right now,” Nuzzo notes, “public health experts have a difficult task of urging authorities who can do something about H5N1 to take action while maintaining public trust…. It is not easy but is important to communicate that the threat level for most people is low but that if nothing is done, it could become quite high.”

Infectious. Nuzzo observes, “The virus could mutate to gain the ability to infect people more easily. Because we don’t have immunity to this virus, a version that becomes highly contageous would probably cause a new pandemic.” 

Recovered. Or rather, the lack of recovery: “H5N1 shouldn’t have to start a pandemic to be considered a public threat,” Nuzzo says. “Among the nearly 900 people known to have contracted the virus worldwide since 2003, about half have died. This means that H5N1 is typically more deadly than the viruses that cause seasonal flu and Covid-19.”

“In a recent study,” Nuzzo describes, “ferrets—which are considered proxies for how influenza viruses affect humans—were able to spread the virus and died from it. This warns us that the virus retains the potential to be quite dangerous.”

“Though we don’t yet know,” says Nuzzo, “of anyone who got H5N1 from consuming milk or meat in the United States, cats that drank raw milk on H5N1-infected dairy farms have died.”  

Containment Actions. Nuzzo recounts, “The response to H5N1 and other avian flu viruses on poultry farms has prompted swift containment actions that continue. The U.S.D.A. requires farmers to kill entire flocks if just one infection is identified.”

“In comparison,” she notes, “the response to H5N1 on dairy farms has been sluggish…. Of great concern is that surveillance and response to infections on dairy farms is largely voluntary…. In some states, health officials have been unable to get access to farms to monitor workers and investigate how the virus is spreading.”

Apparently the dairy lobby is a formidable one.

“H5N1 is enough of a risk now to warrant action,” Nuzzo concludes, “before the virus becomes a pandemic threat to America. By that point, everyone will have to worry.”

Thanks, Dr. Nuzzo, for this thoughtful essay. I thank The New York Times for publishing it. And I dearly hope this matter avoids politicization. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024