Bird Flu Spreading Among US Cattle, WHO Scientist Urges Vigilance

United States: According to the World Health Organization (WHO) chief scientist, the bird flu has been spreading among cattle in the US.

In Thursday’s report, the scientist urged for better tracking and preparation for the virus. However, till now, it is not evident that the highly communicable H5N1 flu virus has the ability to spread from person to person.

More about the bird flu

The flu strain was first found in birds in 1996, which was seen as a potential fatal harm to be posed to farmed and wild fowl. However, in the past few years, with an increasing number of infection cases in mammals, it has been shown that the virus strain is expanding its spawn to new hosts and inevitably moving closer to people.

Dr. Jeremy Farrar, a British medical researcher and chief scientist at WHO since 2023, told reporters on Thursday in Geneva, “The great concern, of course, is that in doing so and infecting ducks and chickens — but now increasingly mammals — that that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans. And then critically, the ability to go from human-to-human transmission,” as CNN Health reported.

Moreover, “We have to watch, more than watch, we have to make sure that if H5N1 did come across to humans with human-to-human transmission that we were in a position to immediately respond with access equitably to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics,” Farrar said.

However, generally, H5N1 doesn’t appear to transmit from one person to another; the other humans can catch it while being exposed to other infected animals.

In a recent case, a person from Texas, US, was found to be positive for H5N1. According to the reports, he was working as a farm worker, where the dairy cattle got into contraction with the virus. Hence, the man received the virus.

It was the only second case reported so far in humans in the US. The first case was found in a poultry worker in Colorado in 2022.

According to the WHO reports, though the strain doesn’t commonly spread to humans, however, the researchers are worried about the deadliness of the infection. It is because, since 2003, more than 889 human cases and 463 deaths have been accounted for in 23 countries, which means the mortality rate has reached 52 percent.

Dr. Richard Webby, director of the WHO’s coordinating center for studies on the ecology of influenza and a scientist at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, said, “This virus is a really scary virus. It’s something I would hate to see in humans,” a CNN Health reported.