Are COVID-19 errors becoming more common in birds with H5N1 flu?

It’s said that people who don’t learn from history will inevitably repeat it. Will that be the case with the H5N1 avian influenza virus, which has been circulating among birds for years, jumped to dairy cattle earlier this year, and showed up in a pig a month ago? Is hindsight not 2020? Are we making the same mistakes with the H5N1 bird flu that we did during the COVID-19 pandemic, or is the current situation with the H5N1 virus different enough from the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 pandemic that we don’t have to worry about the “p” word this time?

The public health risk of bird flu is currently rated as low by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There’s no assurance, though, that things will remain that way indefinitely. Here is what we currently understand about H5N1.

For many years, the H5N1 bird flu has been a problem for birds.

Since this particular influenza virus was initially observed to be spreading among birds, it has been dubbed the “bird flu.”. The H5N1 virus has been around for a lot longer than 2021, although I have been documenting its spread through various bird populations worldwide since then.

For instance, there were 18 animal-to-human infections and six fatalities during an outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997. Shortly after H5N1 first appeared in wild birds in Asia in 2003, two people also died.

Due primarily to the fact that it has been causing the U.S. S. According to U.S. reports, the poultry industry has at least 45 commercial poultry flocks and 30 backyard flocks, meaning that a significant number of birds have been infected since April 2024 alone. A. Agriculture Department. Since it has been causing illness and death in birds, this H5N1 outbreak has been dubbed highly pathogenic avian influenza. These fatalities, as well as flock culling efforts to stop the virus’s spread, have already had an impact on people by raising the cost of eggs and poultry and creating shortages.

Since at least the spring of 2024, the H5N1 bird flu has been spreading among cattle.

Dairy cattle started becoming infected earlier this year, which was a holy cow moment. That demonstrated the virus’s capacity for mutation, which allowed it to spread to different animal species. At least 440 dairy herds in 15 U.S. states have contracted the virus since the bird flu was initially identified in cattle in March 2024. S. states, as stated by the U. S. Agricultural Department. Despite the fact that the virus has been found in cow’s milk, including raw milk from a California farm twice last week, you shouldn’t be too concerned about contracting it by consuming properly pasteurized milk or properly prepared beef, such as hamburgers. However, this does not imply that the virus’s spread among cows is insignificant.

The H5N1 bird flu’s recent appearance in pigs does cause reassortment issues.

On October 30, 2024, there was the pig event. At this time, the USDA announced the first H5N1 case in a U.S. S. . Pork. This occurred in a pig on an Oregon backyard farm. Such a declaration raised even more serious issues. This isn’t because the image of a coughing cow is more unsettling than the image of a coughing pig. In pigs, influenza viruses have a tendency to exchange genetic material more quickly and easily than in birds.

This type of switching, known as genetic reassortment, can produce viruses with entirely different genetic material combinations. By combining different genetic materials, viruses can develop new capabilities that may eventually lead to a virus that can infect and spread to even more species, including humans.

The 2009 H1N1 pandemic was caused by pig reassortments.

It is crucial to keep in mind that the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) pandemic was caused by a sequence of reassortment events in pigs. In 2009, a strain of the H1N1 influenza virus that could infect humans was created as a result of these pig events. In the United States, that pandemic caused an estimated 60–8 million cases, 274,304 hospitalizations, and 12,469 fatalities. S. and an approximate global death toll of 284,400. The damage caused by COVID-19, which has killed over 1.2 million people in the United States, was far worse than that. S. . In addition to a long, long list of Covid cases and counting, there have been over 7 million deaths globally.

However, if a novel influenza virus were to jump to humans and spread, don’t expect it to be a direct replica of 2009. 2009 was fortunate for the world because the H1N1 virus resembled a strain that older people had previously been exposed to during a pandemic. This indicated that many elderly people were already somewhat protected from the H1N1 flu virus and were therefore less vulnerable to its most severe consequences. The 1918 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people, is comparable to the 2009 pandemic. At the time, that was about one-fifth of the world’s population.

Here, “novel” is crucial. Your immune system may not know how to respond to a new virus infection and may end up acting erratically, harming your body rather than defending it. Because of this, you can never be sure what will happen when a virus infects a person for the first time. As a result, in addition to the “p” word, H5N1 also carries the risk of a bad “p.”. “”.

In the U.S., there have been 55 confirmed cases of H5N1 bird flu. S. .

There are currently 55 confirmed H5N1 cases in the United States. S. . Most of them have unmistakably come into close contact with animals that are infected. like the dairy worker about whom I wrote a Forbes article. No concrete proof of infected people spreading the virus to other people has been found. Naturally, it would be significant to witness such human-to-human transmission. That would imply that people could subsequently infect one another with a new virus.

To date, the majority of human H5N1 cases have been mild. In 2023, an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia passed away, and an infected teen in British Columbia is in critical condition. Since it’s unclear how the teen became infected in the first place, this second case has sparked more worries.

A virus that isn’t particularly nasty could become nasty due to mutations, particularly if those mutations make the virus more capable of attacking the lower respiratory tracts of humans. Thus, it will be crucial to keep a careful eye on what transpires when each person contracts the infection.

As the H5N1 bird flu spreads, the U. S. is making the same mistakes with COVID-19.

Although the future of the H5N1 virus and its level of threat to humans are still unknown, one thing is certain: the U.S. S. . fails to take all necessary precautions to avoid and get ready for a potential pandemic. Actually, in a lot of ways, the U. A. seems to be making a lot of the same mistakes it did in the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic with the bird flu.

Numerous issues from 2019 are still present today. The U. S. . still lacks thorough respiratory virus reporting and surveillance systems that would enable everyone to see potential spread locations for various pathogens. For instance, good luck figuring out how many COVID-19 cases have happened in your community in the last seven days. Furthermore, significant, long-standing shortcomings in the U.S. were revealed by the COVID-19 scandal. S. unrepaired public health and healthcare systems. For instance, burnout among doctors and nurses has been a recurring issue. Suhauna Hussain recently wrote a story for the Los Angeles Times about the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory staff’s complaints about being overworked and understaffed.

The U.S. still has large gaps. A. equipment to combat H5N1. Take the U.S. S. does not currently have monoclonal antibodies against the virus that are sold commercially. Due to mutations, current antiviral drugs such as baloxavir marboxil and oseltamivir (Tamiflu) may not be as effective against H5N1. Additionally, now is the ideal time to fund H5N1 research. Waiting until a pandemic or human epidemic has already occurred would be equivalent to waiting until your home is on fire before buying fire extinguishers and learning about the damage that fire can do to your house.

Without much of a structured strategy to combat anti-science messaging and thinking, the misinformation and disinformation that hampered the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is still spreading. Evidence-based interventions for infectious diseases, such as vaccinations and the use of face masks, have been successfully politicized. The next time a pandemic strikes, just think of how politicized things might get.

Finally, it appears that political leaders are paying relatively little attention to the bird flu. The worry is that political leaders are once again reproducing the cycle of panic during pandemics and neglect in between pandemics that has plagued pandemic preparedness continually, as I explained for Forbes back in 2020. How much talk about H5N1 preparedness have you heard from the current Presidential administration, the incoming one, or members of Congress other than one party trying to criticize the other?

This is not to suggest that political leaders ought to be running around screaming, “Panic, panic,” and brandishing their weapons. It’s still far too early to use the other p-word, which means pandemic, in reference to what H5N1 bird flu will do, and that p-word should never be used. To use another p-word, preparedness, much more, is definitely not too early.