The first human death from bird flu in the United States has intensified calls for the government to ramp up efforts to stave off the threat of another pandemic — particularly ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Health experts around the world have for months been urging US authorities to increase surveillance and share more information about its bird flu outbreak after the virus started spreading among dairy cows for the first time.
On Monday, Louisiana health authorities reported that a patient aged over 60 was the country’s first person to die from bird flu.
The patient, who contracted avian influenza after being exposed to infected birds, had underlying medical conditions, US health authorities said.
The World Health Organization has maintained that bird flu’s risk to the general population is low, and there is no evidence that it has been transmitted between people.
However health experts have been sounding the alarm about the potential pandemic threat of bird flu, particularly as it has shown signs of mutating in mammals into a form that could spread more easily among humans.
– ‘This is how it could start’ –
The bird flu variant H5N1 was first detected in 1996, but since 2020 millions of birds have died in a record global outbreak. In March the virus started transmitting between dairy cows in the United States.
Since the start of last year, 66 bird flu cases have been recorded in humans in the United States, many of them among farm workers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The US cases had been relatively mild until the Louisiana patient. However nearly half of the 954 human cases of H5N1 recorded since 2003 have been fatal, according to the WHO.
Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, emphasised that the public should not be unduly worried about another pandemic.
“The problem is that this is how it could start,” she added.
Koopmans criticised that “there is not really an effort to contain” the bird flu outbreak among cattle in the United States.
Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University in the United States, told AFP that the first death came after people “have really been shouting for the US government to do more”.
Tom Peacock, a virologist at the Imperial College London, told AFP last month that to avoid a pandemic, governments could be putting more “pressure on the US to try and contain its H5N1 outbreak in cattle”.
Peacock was a co-author of a preprint study released on Monday, which has not been peer-reviewed, describing how the mutations of H5N1 in cattle enhance its ability to infect other mammals — including humans.
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said the United States “are doing a lot of surveillance” on bird flu. “That’s why we’re hearing about it,” she added.
Last week, the US government awarded an additional $306 million to bolster H5N1 surveillance programs and research.
– What should the US do? –
Rick Bright, a former top US health official, has been among those calling for the department of agriculture to release more information about bird flu infections among animals.
“There are still just reams of data from this current administration that haven’t been released,” he told the Washington Post on Monday.
The United States has a stockpile of millions of H5N1 vaccine doses, which Bright said should receive the proper authorisation and be offered to at-risk people such as farm workers.
The Biden government has also been urged to encourage companies to develop rapid home tests, such as those widely used to quickly diagnose Covid, as well as monitor wastewater for bird flu.
Several of the experts called on Biden to act quickly, before president-elect Trump replaces him in less than two weeks.
There are particular concerns about Trump’s pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy is a sceptic of vaccines, which would be among the most powerful weapons to fend off a potential new pandemic. He is also a known fan of raw milk, which has repeatedly been found to be contaminated with bird flu from infected dairy cows.
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