THE much-dreaded H5N1 avian influenza virus is fast spreading from birds to herds of cattle to cats, and most worryingly, to humans. As of this week, five out of nine people infected in the United States — five poultry workers and four dairy farm hands — were confirmed to have contracted avian flu by the country's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Having started early this year in Texas, the avian flu virus has spread to 33 states in the US. The CDC on Wednesday said the public health risk is low, but it is keeping a close watch on "people with animal exposures". But this complacency-inducing conclusion of the CDC comes with at least two concerns highlighted by the American Yale Medicine portal.
One is that we aren't just talking of the nine cases in the US, but hundreds more elsewhere. Since 2003, the medical journal points out, there have been almost 900 cases of human infections around the world, with half ending in fatalities. While 900 out of a population of 8.1 billion people may not be alarming enough, the mortality rate of 50 per cent is. The only comfort we can take is that Yale Medicine acknowledges the mortality rate to be an estimate.
But still, the World Health Organisation's data isn't too far off the Yale Medicine's estimates. Between Jan 1 last year and May 3 this year, the WHO reported 889 human infections in 23 countries, with 463 being fatal. Make that seriously worrying.
The second concern is that the virus is now being detected in new animal species. Though the outbreak in cows is a relatively new development, the avian flu virus has been detected in wild mammals in Canada and the US in 2022. The H5N1 virus has been species jumping since it was first discovered in wild birds, which continue to host the virus. Given the state of science today, nothing much can be done to stop the H5N1 virus from spreading among wild birds or mammals.
But the human case is not as hopeless. The H5N1 virus hasn't jumped from human-to-human. The hope is that the world will be better prepared when it does than it was when Covid-19 struck the world in 2019. Covid-19 showed us where we went wrong. Nations around the world didn't work hard enough to stop Covid-19 from becoming a global pandemic. China, where it all started, couldn't keep the virus from spreading elsewhere. No nation can. Viruses such as the H5N1 virus recognise no borders. Even if they don't jump species, the birds and bats can take them to their kind in neighbouring countries.
But even when Covid-19 became a global pandemic, the world wasn't quick enough to act. Geopolitics made sure of this. The divided world must be blamed for the seven million-odd deaths caused by Covid-19. Information on the virus wasn't shared fast enough, and vaccines, when developed, weren't deployed with the speed to those who needed them most. Vaccines were hoarded. Greed-driven pharmaceutical companies even used the pandemic to force countries to sign one-sided contracts. These wrongs must be made right to handle another human pandemic.
To be prepared, nations must begin to work together selflessly. And the time to do so is now.