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Experts Say Avian Flu Spreads to Humans, Other Mammals [1]
['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder']
Date: 2024-04-03
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
At the start of 2023, the news was all about an egg shortage that had skyrocketed egg prices in grocery stores across the country, for reasons ranging from alleged price gouging to an avian flu outbreak killing egg-laying hens in dozens of states.
Now, egg prices have stabilized, but the avian flu outbreak hasn’t ended. Here’s why that’s concerning.
As of this writing, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that since the outbreak began in February of 2022, just over 82 million birds in the U.S. have been affected by highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), a form of bird flu that causes severe disease and mortality in poultry.
The disease isn’t limited to birds: over the past year, HPAI has been detected in thousands of marine mammals like elephant seals and sea lions, with most of the cases found in animals in South America. In the past three months, avian flu cases have been detected in dairy cows at farms in Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, and Texas.
And most worryingly, just this week it was announced that a dairy worker in Texas tested positive for avian flu after being in contact with infected cows.
The disease’s move from birds to mammals has alerted scientists to the risk it could pose for humans, and this most recent human case in Texas underscores this risk.
“As long as the virus continues to replicate in mammals, it may make it a higher concern for humans,” said wildlife veterinarian Marcela Uhart in a UC Davis article from earlier this year. “That’s why it’s so important to conduct surveillance and provide early warning.”
Zoonotic diseases (ones that pass from animals to humans) are common: the very first human cases of Covid-19 were directly linked to human contact with wildlife. In just a few short months, the virus quickly spread between humans across the world, creating the pandemic we’re all so familiar with.
This human-to-human transmission is exactly what public health experts are most concerned about with avian influenza. While the virus doesn’t currently seem to easily spread between humans, it could evolve to do so. Human infection with avian influenza “poses pandemic potential,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is why every human avian flu case needs to be monitored closely.
The CDC recommends wearing gloves and respiratory and eye protection when handling infected animals, and avoiding handling them whenever possible. But for the many agricultural workers at the frontlines, avoiding exposure to livestock – infected or not – isn’t a realistic option. On factory farms where more than 700,000 of the United States’ agriculture workers are employed, the disease risk could be even greater: research suggests that disease transmission occurs at higher rates on factory farms where animals are kept in close quarters.
While the meat industry is where disease transmission could pose the greatest threat, the U.S. doesn’t have a “comprehensive regulatory scheme to address these risks,” according to Harvard University wildlife researcher Ann Linder. This means that there’s no universal protocol or information-sharing mechanism between different regulatory agencies, which can lead to a more disorganized disease response.
“Our response is reactive, too often waiting until after an outbreak rather than proactively regulating species that we know carry these diseases,” Linder said in an interview earlier this year.
The federal government has a stockpile of vaccines on hand, including two for H5N1 and H7N9 bird flu viruses. If a similar virus were to begin spreading between humans, these vaccines could be used, according to the CDC. The organization also updates the vaccines as the virus evolves.
So far, the few human cases in the U.S. of the current bird flu strain have been mild. The Texas worker had a case of pink eye as their only symptom, and in Colorado where a poultry worker tested positive for bird flu in early 2022, fatigue was the only symptom.
But even with these mild human cases, the evolution of bird flu is worth keeping a close eye on, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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