![]() Compared with where the world was when the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic came on the scene, “we are already ahead of the game.” How the virus would need to change to spread among people is a big unknown The good news is that flu drugs and vaccines that work against the virus already exist, Wille says. Still, experts around the globe are diligently watching for any signs the virus may be evolving to spread more easily between people. And scientists don’t have a full grasp on how these viruses might need to change for human transmission to occur.įor now, it’s encouraging that so few people have gotten infected amid such a large outbreak among birds and other animals, says Marie Culhane, a food animal veterinarian at the University of Minnesota in St. These bird pathogens don’t typically easily infect or circulate among mammals including humans. The impossibility of predicting which avian influenza viruses might make the jump to people and spark an outbreak is in part related to knowledge gaps. Instead, tests may have picked up viral contamination, say in the nose, that the people breathed in while handling infected birds. That leaves open the possibility that those people were not truly infected. case from Colorado and two workers linked to the Spanish mink farm - were in people who didn’t have any respiratory symptoms. What’s more, four of the reported human cases - including a U.S. In February, health officials in China reported an eighth case in a woman whose current condition is unknown. Of seven cases, six people recovered and one person from China died. “This virus is catastrophic for bird populations.”Ī handful of human cases have also been reported, though there’s no evidence that the virus is spreading among people. It’s also likely that millions of wild birds have died, though few governmental agencies are counting, says Michelle Wille a viral ecologist at the University of Sydney who studies avian influenza. Globally, hundreds of millions of domestic poultry have been culled or died from the new variant. (It’s unclear how the mink were exposed, but the animals were fed poultry by-products.) Sea lions off the coast of Peru and wild bears, foxes and skunks, which prey upon or scavenge birds, in the United States and Europe have also tested positive for the virus. In October, there was an H5N1 outbreak on a mink farm in Spain, researchers reported in January in Eurosurveillance. The variant was linked to a seal die-off in Maine last summer.
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