As the bird flu situation develops in the U.S., scientists told Newsweek the virus could become a pandemic–depending on what happens next.
Right now, California is the epicenter of the outbreak, with 34 human cases of bird flu in the state alone, mainly after exposure to cows.
Can you die from bird flu?
It is possible to die from bird flu. In the past, a human infection was likely to be serious—more than 50 percent of the nearly 1000 people infected with bird flu from the 1990s to 2020 died.
However, more recent cases of bird flu have generally been mild, with only one of the 61 cases in the U.S. experiencing severe symptoms requiring hospitalization.
“The fact that we’re seeing a greater proportion of mild cases in the current outbreak (since 2020) may reflect a change in the virus, but it might just be because we’re monitoring it more carefully and picking up mild infections that would previously have been missed,” Professor Ed Hutchinson, virologist at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, told Newsweek.
How dangerous is bird flu?
Most people who have contracted bird flu recently only experienced mild symptoms, such as pink eye, cough, fever, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, muscle aches, fatigue and headaches—similar to regular flu.
However, bird flu can also cause diarrhea, nausea and vomiting and, in severe cases, difficulty breathing, seizures, pneumonia and death.
Bird flu mainly infects animals. Originally, it was contagious among bird populations and, rarely, caused spillover infections to other species such as people.
“In 2020, a variant of this strain—referred to as 2.3.4.4b—emerged that was particularly good at spreading,” said Hutchinson. “In the U.S.A., it fully adapted to cattle and established itself as a novel pathogen of cows.”
The vast majority of bird flu cases confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been linked to exposure to infected animals, such as chickens and cows.
As yet, there has still been no evidence of human-to-human transmission, meaning no person has given bird flu to another person, so the risk to the general public is still believed to be low, according to the CDC.
Will bird flu become a pandemic?
The risk of a bird flu pandemic depends on whether the virus stays primarily an animal disease, with occasional spillover infections, or mutates to be a human illness.
“If we start to get human-to-human transmission, especially going into the winter in the U.S. when flu spreads the best anyways, there is a very high chance that this virus would start to spread,” Jeremy Rossman, senior lecturer in virology at University of Kent, previously told Newsweek. “We just don’t know what that would look like and that is the biggest concern.”
Professor Moritz Kraemer, a biologist specializing in pandemics at the University of Oxford, previously told Newsweek: “The fact that we are only a single mutation away from H5N1 (clade 2.3.4.4.b) potentially shifting from avian to human specificity underscores the importance of continued surveillance and control efforts to reduce the risk of pathogen spillovers.”
Hutchinson said: “When an influenza virus from a different animal adapts to spread effectively among humans, the result is a pandemic.
“At the moment, there is no indication that this has happened for H5N1, and we do not really know enough about this new H5N1 strain to confidently assess how likely it is to make that jump.
“But the more encounters the virus has with humans, the more chances it has to adapt to growing in them, and if it can mix and match its genes with a human seasonal flu, that could accelerate this process.”
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