The World Health Organization has expressed alarm about the spread of H5N1 avian flu, which has a "extraordinarily high" fatality rate in humans.
An outbreak that began in 2020 has resulted in the death or slaughter of tens of millions of chickens. Most recently, the virus's proliferation among various mammal species, particularly domestic cattle in the United States, has raised the danger of human infection, according to the WHO.
"This remains, I think, an enormous concern," the UN health agency's top scientist, Jeremy Farrar, told reporters in Geneva.
Last month, cows and goats joined the list of infected species, which surprised researchers because they were not expected to be susceptible to this kind of influenza. This month, US officials revealed that a person in Texas was recovering from bird flu after being exposed to dairy cattle, and that 16 herds in six states had been affected, most likely as a result of wild bird exposure.
According to Farrar, the A(H5N1) variety has become "a global zoonotic animal pandemic".
"The great concern of course is that in ... infecting ducks and chickens and then increasingly mammals, that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans and then critically the ability to go from human to human," he went on to say.
So yet, there is no evidence that H5N1 is spreading among humans. However, Farrar stated that in the hundreds of cases where humans have been infected through contact with animals over the last 20 years, "the mortality rate is extraordinarily high" because humans have no natural defense to the virus.
According to the WHO, 889 cases and 463 fatalities from H5N1 have been documented from 23 countries between 2003 and 2024, with a case fatality rate of 52%.
The latest US case of human infection following contact with an infected mammal demonstrates the heightened risk. Farrar warned that "this virus is just looking for new, novel hosts" when "you come into the mammalian population, then you're getting closer to humans".
Farrar advocated for enhanced surveillance, stating that it was "very important understanding how many human infections are happening... because that's where adaptation [of the virus] will happen".
"It's a tragic thing to say, but if I get infected with H5N1 and I die, that's the end of it," he told reporters. "If I go around the community and I spread it to somebody else then you start the cycle."
He stated that work were underway to create H5N1 vaccines and medicines, and emphasized the importance of ensuring that regional and national health authorities around the world were capable of diagnosing the virus.
This was done so that "if H5N1 did come across to humans, with human-to-human transmission," the world would be "in a position to immediately respond," Farrar said, urging fair access to vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics.
0 Comments