as avian influenza Amid the rage among birds and dairy cattle across the United States, Georgia became the latest state to detect the virus in a commercial poultry flock, and on Friday, it halted sales of all poultry reduce further spread of diseaseNationally, egg prices are rising — if you can find them in your local grocery store.
has also caused ongoing outbreaks in animals At least 67 human cases of bird fluAll but one cause mild illness. Earlier this month, a man in Louisiana Died after being hospitalized with severe bird flu In December. This is the first death recorded due to H5N1 in the country.
The US has previously licensed three H5N1 vaccines for humans, but they are not commercially available. The government has purchased millions of doses for the national stockpile in case they are needed. But as the outbreak spread, federal health officials under President Joe Biden were hesitant to deploy them. Experts say this decision minimizes the risk and currently, the risk of H5N1 is low. A more targeted strategy would be to vaccinate agricultural workers and others at high risk of infection, but even that measure may be premature. Now, with a change in federal health leadership imminent as President Donald Trump begins his second term, the decision depends on the new administration.
“Right now, from the standpoint of severity and ease of transmission, it does not seem mandatory to have a vaccine to protect humans,” says William Schaffner, a physician and professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. ,
So far, H5N1 has not been identified as spreading from person to person, but health officials are monitoring the virus for any genetic changes that would make transmission between people more likely. Most bird flu infections are related to contact with animals. Of the 67 known human cases in the US, 40 have been linked to sick dairy cattle and 23 have been linked to poultry farms and slaughter operations. In the other four cases, the exact source is not known.
In the US, human cases have been mild, many of them causing only conjunctivitis. In some cases, mild respiratory symptoms have been observed in people. Apart from the Louisiana patient, all individuals who tested positive for H5N1 recovered quickly and never required hospitalization. Historically, however, H5N1 has been fatal in about 50 percent of cases. Since 2003, a total of 954 cases of human H5N1 The World Health Organization has been informed, And about half of them died. The highest human deaths from bird flu have occurred in Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and China.
Those numbers come with some caveats. First, many of these deaths occurred in places where people lived very close to sick chickens. “Under those circumstances, the thinking is that they're likely to get a very large dose of the virus,” Schaffner says.
Also, the case fatality rate – the proportion of infected people who die from the disease – only considers known cases, and some cases of H5N1 no doubt occur because the symptoms of bird flu are similar to those of other respiratory viruses. In the US, language barriers among agricultural workers, lack of testing, and reluctance among workers to report that they are sick are also factors. “We probably miss more cases than we detect, and we're more likely to detect a case,” says Shira Doron, chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Boston and a hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center. Which is serious.”