United States: The bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle one year ago suggested the virus would affect limited, isolated cattle groups before it disappeared at a similar rate as it came.
The outbreak has killed a single person while spreading to 900 herds and dozens of individuals, resulting in a worsening pattern that carries no signal of ending.
More about the news
Experts who were interviewed together agree that the prevention of a pandemic emergency remains possible. New developments throughout the past few weeks show the occurrence of a pandemic outbreak has become a genuine possibility.
Both testing capacity and data release delays, together with ineffective guidelines, allowed transmission opportunities to persist.
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.
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