Like an aviation flu Furs through birds and milk cattle across the United States, Georgia became the latest state to detect the virus in a commercial bird, and on Friday, it has stopped all sales of birds to mitigate further spread of the disease. Nationally, egg prices are growing – if you can find them overall in your local grocery store.
The ongoing explosion in animals also caused At least 67 human cases of bird fluwith all but one causing a gentle disease. Earlier this month, a person in Louisiana died after hospitalized with a severe bird flu In December. It is the country’s first recorded death attributed to H5N1.
The United States has previously authorized three H5N1 vaccines for people, but they are not available commercially. The government has purchased millions of doses for the national share if they need. But even as the outbreak spread, federal health officials under President Joe Biden hesitated to deploy them. Experts say the decision risks, and at the moment the risk of H5N1 remains low. Rolling of vaccine to rural workers and others with a higher risk of infection would be more targeted tactic, but even that measure may be premature. Now, with a change in federal health guidance immediate as President Donald Trump begins his second term, the decision rests with the new administration.
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To date, no person-to-person spread of H5N1 has been identified, but health officials control the virus for some genetic changes that would make a transmission between people more likely. Most bird flu infections relate to animals exhibitions. Of the 67 known human cases in the United States, 40 were linked to sick milk cattle and 23 are associated with bird farms and slaughter operations. In the other four cases, the correct source is not known.
In the United States, human cases were gentle, and many of them caused only conjunctivitis. In some cases, people had gentle respiratory symptoms. In addition to the Louisiana patient, all individuals who performed positive about H5N1 recovered quickly and never needed to be hospitalized. Historically though, H5N1 has been fatal in about 50 percent of cases. Since 2003, a total of 954 cases of human H5N1 were reported to the World Health Organization, And about half of them died. Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and China reported the highest number of human deaths.
Those numbers come with some warnings. For one, many of these deaths occurred in places where people live very close to the sick birds. “In those circumstances, the thinking is that they probably have a very large dose of the virus,” Schaffner says.
Moreover, the case deadly evidence – the proportion of infected people dying from the disease – only considers known cases, and some cases of H5N1 are definitely not undetected in part because symptoms of a bird are similar to other respiratory viruses. In the United States, language barriers between rural workers, lack of trials and reluctance among workers to report that they are also sick. “We probably miss more cases than we detect, and we are much more inclined to detect a severe case,” says Shira Doron, CEO of Tufts Medicine Infections in Boston and hospital epidemiologist of Tufts Medical Center.
