The experts have raised alarm over the latest bird flu outbreak in the US and have warned that it could be 100 times worse than Covid and leads to high fatality rate.
The concerns were raised during a recent briefing where researchers discussed on the H5N1 strain of bird flu. They expressed apprehension that the virus may be approaching a critical threshold that could spark a global pandemic, according to a report by UK-based tabloid Daily Mail.
Dr. Suresh Kuchipudi, prominent bird flu researcher in Pittsburgh warned that H5N1 has the potential to cause a pandemic and has the ability to infect a range of mammals including human and we are really getting close to the virus which is quite dangerous and can cause pandemic like situation.
‘We are not really talking about a virus that is yet to make a jump, we are talking about a virus that is globally present, already infecting a range of mammals and is circulating. It is really high time that we are prepared,” he added.
Another expert, John Fulton, a pharmaceutical industry consultant and founder of Canada-based pharmaceutical company BioNiagara, said that it appears to be 100 times worse than Covid, or it could be if it mutates and maintains its high case fatality rate. Once it’s mutated to infect humans, we can only hope that the [fatality rate] drops.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 52 out of every 100 people diagnosed with H5N1 bird flu have died since 2003, with a total of 462 deaths out of 887 cases. In contrast, the current fatality rate for Covid is less than 0.1 percent. However, at the start of the pandemic, it was around 20 percent.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed an H5N1 infection in a dairy farm worker in Texas, prompting the White House to initiate ‘close monitoring’.
The virus has rapidly spread among dairy herds in five states across the country Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, and Texas affecting millions of animals on both land and sea.
Lets know about H5N1
H5N1 is a subtype of avian influenza A, a group of related bird flu viruses. It’s considered highly pathogenic because it causes severe and often fatal illness in poultry. While it mainly affects birds, H5N1 can also infect wild birds and occasionally mammals, including humans. In non-bird species, the disease can be fatal, but some cases may be mild or show no symptoms.
The first detection of the H5N1 virus was reported in birds in China in 1996 resulting in 18 human cases and 6 deaths from direct bird-to-human transmission.
Ms Kalinga