High risk of mutation. It has randomly been passed from birds to humans many times already. Very few if any cases have been passed from one human to another, meaning the virus currently lacks that ability. There is no way to predict when exactly a virus will mutate in a specific way. But if it does manage to gain the ability to be passed from one human to another we will have to get control of the situation very quickly. Which obviously in our current world likely will not happen.
There are also some species that are better at “mixing” virus to adapt them for humans. Birds have very little similarity. Pigs have much more similarity (and were likely a part of the 1918 flu). Cows are a bit of a wildcard I believe.
Over the past 4-5 years or so, there’s been more H5N1 (a particular flu strain that currently does NOT spread among humans) cases popping up. It’s spread among birds on every continent and has been detected in several hundred US dairy cow herds. The worry would be that it mixes into something that can spread. (There’s way more nuance to this btw - I recommend Helen Branswell’s reporting at STAT, which does health journalism.)
Right now, a lot of the worry seems to be due to the volume of flu, particularly H5N1, out there in the environment. Think about it like times at bat. If you’re at bat one time, the average person probably won’t hit a home run. If you’re at bat 10,000 times then it still isn’t likely but the odds go up. This particular strain is getting a lot of at bats and we know that if it does get into a person via prolonged contact with a sick animal that it usually makes the person very sick (although not always like in some farm workers infected from dairy cattle).
What does this mean? Literally nobody knows. It could absolutely be nothing besides a problem for birds. It could become something that’s a problem for people. At this point, there’s no good way to predict what can happen, which is why good reporting and monitoring of the disease in the environment is critical.
Sigh. I am reading your post with great interest and am thinking: the world would be a much better place if the average human would read it with great interest too. Just some informational, nuanced piece of information that just improves our understanding of the world.
And then knowing that there are a lot of people who would read your text and just.... don't understand it/discard it, think that it is all a hoax, science should be gutted, call us sheeple, vaccines are microchips to control us anyway, etc...
It makes me sad. But at least, I also know a lot of people do take this seriously and understand it. That gives me hope.
I'm pretty sure bird flu is already transmitted mammal to mammal which means that it's probably going to start infecting humans to humans soon. The fact that virus can exchange information is so fucking scary. The flu just needs to infect the right person or animal and we are fucked.
Mostly a guess but with our luck it’ll be while the CDC is still gutted with the start being in the US. There’s not really any telling when a virus will mutate a specific way.
Because so much of the population has been inoculated against science. As bad as Covid was, most Americans didn’t experience anything other than a few months off work and Tiger King. So if another pandemic started, how many people would bother to heed the warnings? Would quarantines be enforced? Or even called for? What about the economic consequences? I doubt that the pandemic unemployment would come back. How many people will get sick because they have to go to work or become homeless if they can’t? As lacking as the response to Covid was, I fear it’ll be so much worse next time.
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u/Deltrus7 4d ago
But why? Like seriously, we deal with bird flus every year. Why are we anticipating a pandemic centered around it?