The World Health Organization’s chief scientist called the bird flu an “enormous concern,” citing critical questions over how the virus is transmitted.
Jeremy Farrar singled out the recent outbreak in dairy cows in the United States — the first time the country’s dairy cattle have been infected with the highly pathogenic avian influenza.
With H5N1 infecting mammals, the “great concern” is that the virus could evolve and allow for human-to-human transmission, Farrar said at a news conference yesterday.
Right now, there’s no indication the virus has the ability to do so, but experts and officials say it’s imperative they closely monitor H5N1’s spread. The more chances a virus has to replicate — in animals or humans — the greater the chance it could mutate to spread more easily from human to human.
How we got here: A highly virulent bird flu was first detected in dairy cows in Texas and Kansas in late March and has since spread to six additional states. On April 1, federal officials announced that a dairy worker in Texas was being treated for bird flu after experiencing eye inflammation, marking only the second human case in the United States. (The first was identified in 2022 in Colorado for the same strain of avian flu.)