The World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed serious concern about the increasing spread of H5N1 bird flu infections in various species, including humans.
“This remains, I think, an enormous concern,” WHO’s chief scientist, Jeremy Farrar, told reporters in Geneva.
With cows and goats now also affected by the ongoing bird flu outbreak that started in 2020, the UN health agency official referred to it as “a global zoonotic animal pandemic.”
“The great concern, of course, is that in infecting ducks and chickens and then increasingly mammals, that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans and then critically, the ability to go from human to human,” Farrar said.
Authorities have reported a bird flu outbreak in two locations within the Alappuzha district of Kerala
While there is no evidence that the influenza A(H5N1) virus is spreading among humans, the ‘extraordinarily high’ fatality rate in the hundreds of cases where humans became sick through contact with animals has raised concerns.
In the last 15 months, the UN agency has recorded 463 deaths from 889 human cases in 23 states, putting the mortality rate at a concerning 52%.
The kind of bird flu that has killed millions of wild birds in recent years has been spotted in a variety of mammals, but this is the first time it has been discovered in cattle, with eight US states detecting the highly dangerous avian influenza in a dairy herd.
When “you come into the mammalian population, then you’re getting closer to humans,” Farrar said, warning that “this virus is just looking for new, novel hosts”.