‘Major Leap’ in Bird Virus Threatens Yet Another Pandemic

The same highly pathogenic bird-flu virus that’s killed tens of millions of chickens and other birds over the past year just got a lot closer to infecting people, too.

An unusual outbreak of the H5N1 virus in minks—relatives of weasels—at a Spanish fur farm last fall also exposed the farm’s staff to the virus. Swift action by health authorities helped prevent any human infections. This time.

But bird flu isn’t going away. And as H5N1 continues to circulate in domestic and wild birds, causing millions of animal deaths and tightening the supply of eggs, it’s also getting closer and closer to the human population. “This… avian influenza has the potential to become a major problem to humans,” Adel Talaat, a professor of pathobiological sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Daily Beast.

It might be a matter of time before H5N1 achieves large-scale “zoonosis” and makes the leap to the human species. If and when that happens, we could have yet another major viral crisis on our hands. On top of the COVID pandemic, worsening seasonal RSV, the occasional monkeypox flare-up and annual flu outbreaks.

Reports this week suggested that the current wave of bird flu could be crossing over into mammals with more regularity. Scientists found traces of bird flu in seals that died in a “mass mortality event” in the Caspian Sea in December, and the BBC reported this week that tests in Britain had found the virus in a range of mammals up and down the country. On Jan. 9, the World Health Organization was informed that a 9-year-old girl in Ecuador had tested positive.

Bird flu isn’t new. Scientists first identified the virus back in the 1870s. There’ve been dozens of major outbreaks over the years—and they’ve grown more frequent, and more severe, as the global population of domestic poultry has expanded in order to feed a growing human population.

H5N1, a more-severe “highly pathogenic avian influenza” virus—or HPAI—first appeared in China in the 1990s. It and other HPAIs have achieved zoonosis on a small scale, mostly in Asia. Several dozen people have died of bird flu in recent decades.

But so far, bird flu has mostly infected, well, birds. That makes it a huge problem for poultry farmers. And for people who buy eggs, of course. The current H5N1 outbreak has killed, or compelled farmers to cull, nearly 60 million chickens, turkeys, geese and ducks in the United States alone. The cullings drove up the price of eggs to nearly $5 per dozen at U.S. grocery stores last fall, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s several times the long-term average price.

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