United States: The arrival of bird flu in dairy cattle one year ago seemed to indicate limited, isolated herds would suffer before the virus vanished as fast as it had arrived.
More than 900 herds alongside dozens of people have become infected by the virus in a worsening outbreak that killed one person despite no indication it will cease spreading.
More about the news
Multiple experts interviewed together maintain that a pandemic situation remains preventable. Recent developments in the past few weeks indicate that a pandemic emergence now stands as an actual risk.
Experts point to failures similar to the ones that marred the COVID-19 pandemic response: guidelines had no teeth, test capacity was inadequate, and data release delays exploited transmission opportunities.
The New York Times has discovered that dairy herds in Idaho originally infected in spring exhibited mild recurring symptoms during the late fall.
More than 20 million egg-laying chickens in the U.S. died in the last quarter of 2024 because of bird flu, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows, marking the worst toll inflicted on America's egg supply since the outbreak began.
— MiMi ♥️🇺🇸 (@MiMiLooLooTx) January 28, 2025
The record number of chicken deaths,… pic.twitter.com/oMCflVpGRf
What more are the experts stating?
The US Department of Agriculture announced in mid-January that Idaho dairy herds remained free of new H5N1 infections since October.
Officials from the state addressed milder cases through public meetings during November. Experts agree that this finding of milder disease detection in pediatric animals through re-infection presents a positive development for agricultural producers, seattletimes.com reported.
H5N1 virus transmission amongst farms extends indefinitely, which raises concerns that it will develop into potentially deadly strains of the virus — a “high-risk” evolutionary path, according to Louise Moncla from the University of Pennsylvania.
“You could easily end up with endemically circulating H5 in dairy herds without symptoms, obscuring rapid or easy detection,” Moncla added.
Scientific experts cannot foresee when or if the virus will gain human-to-human transmission capability. Medical experts are concerned that bird flu might rapidly worsen its spread under the right genetic conditions.
Moreover, “I’m still not pack-my-bags-and-head-to-the-hills worried, but there have been more signals over the past four to six weeks that this virus has the capacity” to set off a pandemic, according to Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.