Almost two years after the current outbreak of bird flu began in the United Statesmonte carlo online casino, we are still flying blind.
Indications that H5N1 may have jumped to mammals first appeared the same year, when the virus killed hundreds of seals in New England and Quebec that summer, and then that fall there was a mass infection event at a Spanish mink farm. Epidemiologists have been warning about the risks of an overdue bird flu pandemic for decades, and so each new development arrived like the next beat in an already familiar story, almost too perfectly plotted to alarm. The outbreaks on American dairy farms began this March and the first human case in the United States since then was identified in April, which means that it has now been more than three full months since a pathogen long identified as among the most worrisome potential sources of a new pandemic infected an American this year. There is still nothing like a serious plan to even properly monitor the spread.
In Britain, the Health Security Agency recently raised its threat level to 4 out of 6, the stage immediately before large-scale human outbreaks. In Europe, countries are proactively vaccinating dairy and poultry workers against infection, with 15 nations already securing a total of 40 million doses through the European Commission. In the United States, despite having a stockpile of those vaccines, we are not distributing them, instead focusing on standing up voluntary supplies of seasonal flu vaccines to frontline workers. (The hope is that this will prevent animal infections of human flu that might aid in the further mutation of H5N1.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cited the low number of cases to justify its inaction, but it has also moved remarkably slowly to promote the kind of widespread surveillance testing that could actually identify cases. Only recently has the agency begun to mobilize real funding for a testing push, after a period of months in which various federal groups batted around responsibility and ultimate authority like a hot potato. And as was the case early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the C.D.C.’s preferred test for bird flu “has issues.” Three months into the outbreak, only 45 people had even been tested; six weeks later, the total number of people tested had grown only to “230+.”
Globally, H5N1 has infected more than 500 bird and mammal species, as Sharon Guynup has documented for Mongabay — a global “panzootic” which some conservationists believe “now presents an existential threat to the world’s biodiversity.” In the U.S., the bird flu has been identified in more than 100 million chickens in 48 states and 178 cattle herds spread across more than a dozen states, each a new cluster shedding virus out into a separate community. But delays in reporting details of even those dairy cases mean that the information is not especially helpful to any effort to control spread, and U.S. officials do not even appear to be sharing all the information they do have. Most American dairy farms are not regularly testing for H5N1, partly because the decision to do so has been left up to them, and in fact have “refused to cooperate with efforts to chart how deeply the virus has infiltrated U.S. herds,” as Helen Branswell of STAT has reported, “seeing the possible stigma of admitting they have H5N1-infected cows as a greater risk than the virus itself.”
Most farms aren’t supplying N95 masks, goggles or aprons to protect workers, either, and when Amy Maxmen of KFF News surveyed farm workers to ask why they weren’t getting tested, “no one had heard of bird flu, never mind gotten P.P.E. or offers of tests,” she reported. “One said they don’t get much from their employers, not even water. If they call in sick, they worry about getting fired.” Last month, a crew was deployed to slow the spread of the disease by killing every last chicken of 1.78 million on a large Colorado farm where H5N1 had broken out and six of the workers contracted the virus, partly because the gear they’d been provided was hard to use in the punishing 104-degree heat.
In June, Robert Redfield, former director of the C.D.C., echoed many epidemiologists in predicting that “it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic.” In July, Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, warned that the steady beat of new cases “screams at us that this virus is not going away.” Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician who studies global disease surveillance, marveled that the American effort to track the spread of the disease was absolutely amateurish and the country’s apparent indifference “unbelievable.”
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