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I keep getting flashbacks of Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, talking about how becoming a professional riverboat pilot left him incapable of *not* noticing hidden patterns in every ripple along his later-in-life journeys. I’ll keep doing these weekly updates, but don’t be afraid to let me know if I’m oversampling H5N1 or other emerging disease outbreaks, okay?

You can't divorce the social context of a disease outbreak from the outbreak response, @WHO's chief scientist @JeremyFarrar told me yesterday in an interview about the #H5N1 #birdflu in cows situation. The social context of this one sure is challenging. https://t.co/zHWWAolE8t

— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@HelenBranswell) May 7, 2024

Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, was working in Vietnam 20 years ago when the H5N1 virus started to spread across Asia — at that point in poultry. He recalls there was a reluctance among farmers to cull their chickens because they weren’t being compensated for them. Movement of infected birds to evade culling only served to disseminate the virus, which in the years since has spread to all continents except Australia.

It’s important to keep that experience in mind, he told STAT Monday, as the H5N1 bird flu virus now spreads among dairy cattle in the U.S. Farrar stressed that the social context is key in responding to disease threats like H5N1, noting that a similar reluctance among dairy farmers to report outbreaks or allow testing of their workers is adding to the challenges in assessing how much transmission is occurring and the risk it poses to people.

“You can’t just take the virus and the biological surveillance and divorce it from the environment and the social construct that it’s happening in,” Farrar said in an interview from WHO headquarters in Geneva. “That’s the reality.”…

While he believes the risk of a human flu pandemic triggered by the H5N1 virus is low, should it happen, the social context will also be crucial, Farrar continued. The mental toll of the taxing Covid-19 pandemic hangs over the public, health care workers, public health agencies, and governments. Getting people to again buy into measures that might slow spread, such as social distancing or school closures, would likely be tough, he said.

“The hangover is absolutely true across all societies, I think,” Farrar said. “Public health agencies but also health care workers around the world are shattered. … It’s a global phenomena and the world’s willingness to either have vaccines, mRNA, or otherwise, and have any school closures, masks, whatever interventions you may talk about, would not be the same as they were back in 2020.”

All the more reason, Farrar suggested, to take the actions needed to ensure the spread of bird flu in cows does not trigger a worse crisis. “That makes the case that we better do what we can to avoid an event happening because I think the response would understandably be very different.”

3. What we should be concerned about is that fact that the viruses is getting way too many chances. It keeps expanding its tropism. The more animals it replicates in, the more chances it gets to sample new configurations.
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— Marc Johnson (@SolidEvidence) May 4, 2024

5. In my opinion we should be focusing our attention on wastewater testing downstream of meat processing plants (for all types of animals). It wouldn't matter what tissue the virus is in, it would end up in the water and give us an early warning.
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— Marc Johnson (@SolidEvidence) May 4, 2024

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COVID-19 Coronavirus (& H5N1) Updates: May 8, 2024Post + Comments (19)