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By David Wallace-Wells
Review Editor
Nearly two years after the existing bird flu outbreak began in the United States, we are still flying blind.
Indications that H5N1 may have possibly spread to mammals first emerged that same year, when the virus killed a bunch of seals in New England and Quebec that summer, and then that fall a massive infection at a Spanish mink farm. Epidemiologists have been cautious for decades about the dangers of an avian flu pandemic, and each new progression came as the next heartbeat of an already familiar story, at most plotted too perfectly to cause alarm. Outbreaks on U. S. dairy farms U. S. infections began last March and the first human case in United States United States was known in April, meaning it’s been more than three months since a pathogen long known as one of the most worrisome potential sources of infection in a new pandemic inflamed an American this year. There is still no such thing as a serious plan to monitor the spread very well.
In Britain, the Health Security Agency recently raised its risk point to four out of six, the point that immediately precedes large-scale human outbreaks. In Europe, countries are proactively vaccinating staff in the dairy and poultry sectors who fight infection, and 15 countries have already obtained a total of four0 million doses through the European Commission. In the United States we have a stockpile of these vaccines, we do not distribute them, but rather we focus on voluntarily offering seasonal flu vaccines to frontline personnel. (The hope is that this will prevent human flu animal infections that could contribute to a new H5N1 mutation. ) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cited low case numbers as justification for inaction, but progress has also been noticeably slow. announce the kind of widespread surveillance testing that can actually identify cases. Only recently has the company begun raising a genuine budget for a testing campaign, after an era of months in which various federal teams fought like a hot potato for responsibility and final authority. And as was the case at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the CDC’s favorite test. Avian flu “presents problems. ” Three months after the outbreak began, only forty-five other people had been tested; Six weeks later, the total number of people tested was reduced to “230+. ”
Globally, H5N1 has inflamed more than 500 species of birds and mammals, as Sharon Guynup documented for Mongabay: a global “panzootic” that some conservationists now say “poses an existential threat to global biodiversity. ” in more than 100 million chickens in 48 states and 178 farm animal herds in more than a dozen states, each a new group shedding the virus in a different community, but delays in reporting details important, even in those dairy cases, mean the loss of data. It’s not particularly helpful to efforts to control the spread, and U. S. officials don’t even appear to be sharing all the information they have. Most American dairy farms do not regularly check for H5N1, in part because the decision to do so has been left to Americans. and in fact “have refused to cooperate in efforts to determine the extent to which the virus has infiltrated American herds,” as Helen Branswell reported to STAT, “given the imaginable stigma of admitting to having H5N1-infected cows. ” “. a threat greater than the virus itself. “
Most farms also don’t supply masks, goggles, or N95 aprons to protect staff, and when KFF News’ Amy Maxmen interviewed farm staff to ask them why they weren’t getting tested, “no one had ever heard of bird flu, let alone bird flu. “influenza. E. P. I. o give evidence,” he said. One of them said they didn’t get much from their employers, not even water. If they report sick, they fear they will be fired. Last month, a team was deployed to slow the spread of the disease by killing each and every last bird of 1. 78 million at a large Colorado farm where H5N1 had been infected and where six staff members contracted the virus, in part because of the apparatus they had been provided. in the punishing heat of 104 degrees.
In June, Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, echoed many epidemiologists in predicting that “the question is not if, but rather when are we going to have an avian flu pandemic. “In July, Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the CDC, the Center for Pandemic Control at Brown University School of Public Health, warned that the steady rate of new cases “screams at us that this virus is not going away. “Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician who studies global disease surveillance, said he was surprised that the U. S. Efforts to track the spread of the disease were surely amateurish and that the country’s obvious indifference was “unbelievable. “
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