Like bird flu raging in birds and dairy cows across the US, Georgia became the latest state to detect the virus in a commercial poultry flock and on Friday it halted all poultry sales. hold for the people. minimize further spread of the disease. Nationwide, egg prices are skyrocketing — if you can find them at your local grocery store.
Continuous outbreaks in animals have also resulted at least 67 cases of bird flu infection in humanswith all but one case causing mild illness. Earlier this month, one was in Louisiana died after being hospitalized for severe bird flu in December. This was the first recorded death in the country due to H5N1.
The United States previously licensed three H5N1 vaccines for humans, but they were not marketed. The government has purchased millions of doses for the national reserve in case they are needed. But even as the outbreak spreads, federal health officials under President Joe Biden have been hesitant to deploy them. Experts say this decision is risky and currently, the risk of contracting H5N1 is still low. Rolling out vaccines to farmworkers and others at higher risk of infection would be a more targeted tactic, but even that measure may be premature. Now, with a change in federal health leadership looming as President Donald Trump begins his second term, the decision falls to the new administration.
“Right now, from the standpoint of severity and transmissibility, it's important to get a vaccine to protect people,” said William Schaffner, a physician and professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. does not appear to be mandatory.” .
To date, human-to-human spread of H5N1 has not been determined, but health officials are monitoring the virus to detect any genetic changes that could make person-to-person transmission more likely. taller person. Most cases of avian influenza are related to exposure in animals. Of the 67 known human cases in the US, 40 have been linked to sick dairy cows and 23 have been linked to poultry farms and culling operations. In the remaining four cases, the exact source is unknown.
In the US, human cases of the disease are mild, many cases only causing conjunctivitis. In some cases, patients have mild respiratory symptoms. Aside from the patient in Louisiana, all those who tested positive for H5N1 recovered quickly and did not require hospitalization. However, historically, H5N1 has been fatal in about 50% of cases. Since 2003, there have been a total of 954 cases of H5N1 infection in humans has been reported to the World Health Organization, and about half of them died. Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and China have reported the highest number of human bird flu deaths.
Those numbers come with a few caveats. First, many of those deaths occurred in places where people lived very close to sick poultry. “In those cases, people think they may have had a very large dose of the virus,” Schaffner said.
Additionally, the case fatality rate—the proportion of infected people who die from the disease—accounts only for known cases, and some H5N1 cases will certainly go undetected in part because of flu symptoms. poultry is similar to other respiratory viruses. In the US, language barriers among farmworkers, lack of testing and workers' reluctance to report that they are sick are also factors. “We probably miss more cases than we detect, and we more likely to detect a more serious case.”