Flu Ravaging Birds Across Globe Could Cause Next Pandemic

[left-of-center2012]

The infection of seven Russian farmworkers by a virus that is lethal among birds underscores the need for close monitoring to avert another disaster, a new study says. Scientists are urging vigilance to prevent a subtype of bird flu that has infected wildfowl and poultry in 46 countries and a small group of Russian farmworkers from triggering the next pandemic.

After 101,000 hens died at a farm in far southwest Russia in early December, tests quickly confirmed the culprit: the H5N8 strain of avian influenza virus. Virologists took nose swabs and blood samples of the workers and learned seven had been infected, marking the first known cases of bird-to-human transmission of H5N8, though none of them showed any symptoms and they did not transmit the virus to any of their family members nor close contacts.

“The virus can be transmitted from birds to humans, it has overcome the interspecies barrier,” Anna Popova, a Russian public health official, announced. “As of today, this variant of the influenza virus is not being transmitted from person to person. Only time will tell how quickly future mutations will allow it to overcome this barrier,” she added.

Just last year, continuous outbreaks of the virus in both poultry and wild birds in Taiwan, South Africa, Europe, Israel, Japan and South Korea, led to the slaughter of thousands of birds, the report states. H5N8 has “clearly dis­played a propensity for rapid global spread in migratory birds” and an ability bind to human cells as its swaps gene segments with other bird flu subtypes in a process called reassortment, Shi and Gao say.

Like Covid-19, bird flu is a zoonotic disease, one that can spread between humans and animals. While the exact source of the coronavirus outbreak is unknown, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it came from an animal, probably a bat.

https://www.courthousenews.com/scientists-flu-ravaging-birds-across-globe-could-cause-next-pandemic/

[roamer65]

1. All it needs is one human to recombinate with another flu virus.

Then BOOM.