Health practitioners warn that America hasn’t learned enough lessons from Covid-19 to help contain threats from other pathogens like H5N1 bird flu, which continue to exhibit signs of potential for pandemic. “In other words, we are rather oblivious to how profound this is from the zoonotic approach—the animal-to-human process,” said Dr. Deborah Birx on CNN Newsroom with Pamela Brown.
Birx also proposed a lot more extensive testing of farm workers, who comprise the majority of the identified cases in the United States, saying that the country was heading into a period of even more risk as seasonal flu starts to circulate. This raises the specter of the possibility that the same person could be infected with the dual threats of seasonal flu and H5N1, which may swap gene segments through reassortment that gives the avian flu virus more tools to infect humans.
Table of Contents
CDC Response to H5N1 Testing Concerns (Bird Flu)
On Friday, the CDC shot back, issuing a statement to CNN that “comments on avian flu H5N1 testing are out of date, misleading, and inaccurate.” Last November, the agency changed its recommendation, opening up testing to include asymptomatic persons with high-risk exposures to avian flu. Hospitals were instructed this past summer to continue subtyping flu viruses as a part of the CDC’s nationwide monitoring effort, rather than the customary continued downscaling of surveillance at the season’s end. More than 70,000 specimens have been tested for novel flu viruses, watching for symptoms in more than 10,000 ex-public flu-exposed individuals, and of them, 540 were specifically tested for H5N1.
Seasonal Flu Vaccination Efforts for Farmworkers
The US CDC is running a seasonal flu vaccination program for farmworkers in states where infected herds have been found to protect them from seasonal flu and curb the chance of the H5N1 virus reassortment. The agency has said that the virus does not presently spread from human to human, but risks continue to show up that could upgrade the H5N1 virus for more efficient human infection to take place. A genetic analysis of samples from the Louisiana patient recently hospitalized with the country’s first severe case of H5N1 shows the virus probably mutated in the patient to be potentially more transmissible to humans, but there’s no evidence the virus was passed to anyone else yet.
Spread of H5N1 in Cattle and USDA’s Role
The animal transmission of H5N1 has moved in such a flash that an outbreak has hit herds in 16 states since its discovery in cattle in March. The US Department of Agriculture has initiated an active national program on milk testing to monitor the spread of the virus through dairy cattle, with 13 states in total participating in the program.
This program states that raw milk samples should be obtained before pasteurization and collected for testing by the USDA. “The pasteurization process inactivates the virus, thereby rendering pasteurized milk safe for consumption,” according to government agencies. However, the US Food and Drug Administration and other health agencies have already cautioned consumers against the drinking of raw milk due to the dangers of E. coli, salmonella, and listeria.
Concerns Over Rapid Spread of H5N1 and Vaccine Development
Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, believes the USDA dropped the ball in addressing the virus’s rapid migration among cattle, calling attention to the laid-back lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic that demanded faster work on flu vaccines. His risk assessment for H5N1 has gone unchanged, but he’s worried about what threats pathogens like the bird flu could pose.
NEXT POST: 10 Reasons Why Vaccines are Important for Children
