By Texas Biomedical Research Institute
“Researchers at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute (Texas Biomed) have identified a strain of bird flu isolated from a human in Texas that carries a distinctive set of mutations, making it more adept at replicating in human cells and causing severe disease in mice. This strain was compared to one found in dairy cattle, and the findings are detailed in Emerging Microbes & Infections.
The discovery underscores a significant concern about the H5N1 strains of bird flu currently circulating in the U.S.: the virus’s rapid mutation when it infects a new host species.”
to read the full story go to
https://scitechdaily.com/first-u-s-h5n1-death-sparks-urgency-scientists-warn-that-bird-flu-is-mutating-faster-than-expected/
by Juliana Kim
“”Accelerating the development of new vaccines will allow us to stay ahead and ensure that Americans have the tools they need to stay safe,” outgoing HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement on Friday.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/18/nx-s1-5266868/bird-flu-vaccine-moderna
“As bird flu concerns grow, scientists race to develop new vaccines”
By Berkeley Lovelace Jr.
“The federal government already has two bird flu vaccine candidates in limited quantities in the nation’s stockpile. Those shots use traditional vaccine technology, but take far longer to produce — a hindrance during an emergency like a fast-moving pandemic.
Dawn O’Connell, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, said an mRNA-based bird flu vaccine is important because the technology is faster to develop and easier to update than more traditional vaccines.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/bird-flu-concerns-grow-scientists-race-develop-new-vaccines-rcna187824
By Mary Kekatos
“”It’s not universal surveillance. We’re not able to capture all of the cases that we might like to catch,” Moody said. “And so, it’s kind of hard to know what to do with isolated data points like this, when you get a report of, yes, this is a confirmed case. But it’s also like, what is the actual denominator here? How many cases are there really out there? And it’s kind of hard to tell.””
“So, I’m not sure that the identification of this case tells us a whole lot, other than, yep, it’s circulating,” Moody added.”
to read the full story go to
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/3rd-case-bird-flu-unknown-source-infection-fight/story?id=117740861
By Erika Edwards“
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday urged labs nationwide to determine within 24 hours of admission whether people hospitalized with the flu have seasonal influenza or are infected with the bird flu that’s behind an escalating outbreak in dairy cows and poultry.”to read the full article go tohttps://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-urges-faster-testing-find-human-bird-flu-cases-rcna187870
“CDC urges doctors to speed subtyping of patients hospitalized with the flu to better track H5N1 infections”
By Brenda Goodman, CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/16/health/cdc-urges-doctors-to-speed-subtyping-h5n1-infections/index.html?cid=ios_app
“Accelerated Subtyping of Influenza A in Hospitalized Patients”
Distributed via the CDC Health Alert Network
“CDC has routinely recommended influenza testing for hospitalized patients with suspected influenza. In light of the ongoing avian influenza A(H5) virus animal outbreak in the United States, CDC now recommends subtyping of all influenza A virus-positive specimens from hospitalized patients on an accelerated basis. This accelerated subtyping is part of a comprehensive strategy to identify severe human infections with avian influenza A(H5) viruses, in addition to characterizing seasonal influenza viruses in a timely fashion.”
to read the full press release go to
https://www.cdc.gov/han/2025/han00520.html
“White House’s Pandemic Office, Busy With Bird Flu, May Shrink Under Trump”
By Brian Bennett
“By Inauguration Day on Monday, most of the pandemic office’s staff will have cleared out their desks. The office, officially known as the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, or OPPR, is losing more than half of its 18-person staff as the Biden Administration hands off the duties to a Trump Administration that has yet to fill multiple key pandemic-response positions, according to two Biden Administration officials. “
to read the full article go to
https://time.com/7207599/trump-bird-flu-pandemic-office/
By Public Health On Call
“In this Q&A, adapted from the January 14 episode of Public Health On Call, Stephanie Desmon speaks with Meghan Davis, DVM, PhD ’12, MPH ’08, associate professor in Environmental Health and Engineering, and Andrew Pekosz, PhD, professor in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, about why it’s time to double down on efforts to limit H5N1 transmission among cattle and birds, concerns about cats and other mammals, and how to prevent the virus from gaining a foothold in humans.”
to read the full article go to
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/bird-flu-is-raising-red-flags-among-health-officials
“How Worried to Be About Bird Flu”
By Lora Kelley
“Lora Kelley: We last spoke in April, after a dairy worker became infected with bird flu. At the time, you described your level of concern about bird flu as “medium.” How would you describe your level of worry now?
Katherine J. Wu: At this point, I would upgrade it to “medium-plus.” I don’t think I will upgrade to “high” unless we start to see strong evidence of human-to-human transmission. I am not ruling out that possibility, but we aren’t there yet.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/01/how-worried-to-be-about-bird-flu/681331/
“CDC tests confirm another H5N1 case from California”
By Lisa Schnirring
“The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today confirmed another human H5N1 avian flu case in California, which likely reflects follow-up testing of a presumed positive involving a San Francisco child. The latest confirmation puts the national total since early 2024 to 67 cases, of which 38 are from California.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/cdc-tests-confirm-another-h5n1-case-california
“Why not making bird flu vaccines available now is a mistake”
By Leana S. Wen
“The good news is that the same companies that made those original vaccines have updated them and already manufactured about 5 million doses of the updated vaccines, and that the administration has contracted with them to produce another 5 million by this spring. Ten million shots of a two-dose vaccine won’t come close to meeting demand if bird flu became a pandemic, but in that horrific situation, the virus likely will have evolved further, and a new vaccine would have to be developed anyway. The initial 10 million can at least be used for those at highest risk.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/16/biden-bird-flu-vaccine-fda/
“How would RFK Jr. handle bird flu? His record on vaccines has experts on edge”
By Will Stone
“The incoming Trump administration will have to prepare for this risk. As H5N1 spills into more people and animals, scientists warn it could evolve to better infect humans and become more dangerous.
Trump and his picks to helm federal health agencies have largely been silent on bird flu. The messaging so far — and the track record of those Trump has chosen to oversee a potential bird flu crisis — is “worrisome,” says Dr. Andrew Pavia, professor of medicine at the University of Utah who’s worked on influenza pandemic preparedness for more than two decades.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/16/nx-s1-5254733/trump-cabinet-picks-rfk-bird-flu
By Phoebe Weston
“Bird flu poses a threat that is “unique and new in our lifetime” because it has become a “‘panzootic” that can kill huge numbers across multiple species, experts warn. For months, highly pathogenic bird flu, or H5N1, has been circulating in dairy farms, with dozens of human infections reported among farm workers. It has now jumped into more than 48 species of mammals, from bears to dairy cows, causing mass die-offs in sea lions and elephant seal pups. Last week, the first person in the US died of the infection.
This ability to infect, spread between, and kill such a wide range of creatures has prompted some scientists to call H5N1 a “panzootic”: an epidemic that leaps species barriers and can devastate diverse animal populations, posing a threat to humans too. As shrinking habitats, biodiversity loss and intensified farming create perfect incubators for infectious diseases to jump…”
to read the full article go to
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/15/age-of-the-panzootic-scientists-warn-of-more-devastating-diseases-jumping-between-species-aoe
“Bird flu is mutating, but antivirals still work for now”
by Texas Biomedical Research Institute
“One of the earliest strains of bird flu isolated from a human in Texas shows a unique constellation of mutations that enable it to more easily replicate in human cells and cause more severe disease in mice compared to a strain found in dairy cattle, researchers from Texas Biomedical Research Institute (Texas Biomed) report in Emerging Microbes & Infections.
The finding highlights a key concern about the H5N1 strains of bird flu currently circulating in the U.S.: the speed at which the virus can mutate when introduced to a new host.”
“”The clock is ticking for the virus to evolve to more easily infect and potentially transmit from human to human, which would be a concern,” said Texas Biomed Professor Luis Martinez-Sobrido, Ph.D., whose lab specializes in influenza viruses and has been studying H5N1 since the outbreak began last year. The team has developed specialized tools and animal models to test prophylactic vaccines and therapeutic antivirals.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/why-mild-h5n1-bird-flu-cases-have-been-perplexing-scientist/
“Trump and Biden officials begin talks on bird flu crisis”
By Berkeley Lovelace Jr., Erika Edwards and Suzy Khimm
“Amid an escalating bird flu outbreak spreading in the United States, federal health officials have begun to brief members of the incoming Trump administration about how they’ve responded to the crisis so far.
“We sent them all of the information on our work,” said a Biden administration health official familiar with transition briefings within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It’s the first indication that the two administrations appear to be working together to prioritize the H5N1 response.
to read the full article go to
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-biden-bird-flu-crisis-meeting-transition-rcna187190
“Biden administration allocates $306m in its final days for bird flu response”
By Melody Schreiber
“Awarding funding to regional, state and local health departments is particularly important because “that seems to be an important catalyst to take action”, said Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.
“It’s often federal action of some sort, usually in the form of money, that gets states activated,” Nuzzo added.
Improving communication and data-sharing between local entities like healthcare professionals, businesses and school leaders is key for understanding patterns of disease in communities, Ranney said: “Who’s getting sick from what, when and why?””
to read the full article go to
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/trump-biden-bird-flu-crisis-meeting-transition-rcna187190
By Alvin Powell
““A key thing that we’ve not seen in the case of H5N1 and cattle are superspreading events.””
“We will certainly see another flu pandemic. That’s not an “if”; it’s a “when.” We cannot say how severe it will be, but we can say that it has the potential to be bad. We don’t talk enough about how we would detect it early and what we would do when it happens.”
“Are we doing enough with bird flu right now?
No. I would like to see more thorough investigation of the potential for transmission. I would like to see more careful surveillance of the adapting virus. I would like to understand more about the nature of the infections in the people we’ve identified them in.”
to read the full article go to
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/01/should-we-be-panicked-about-bird-flu-william-bill-hanage/
No, we’re not ‘one mutation away’ from an H5N1 bird flu pandemic. Here are the facts
by Ignacio López-Goñi and Elisa Pérez Ramíre
“Public health efforts should continue to focus on protecting workers exposed to infected animals with preventative measures, such as vaccination, to minimize risk. It is essential to investigate each human case to swiftly detect any changes that may suggest increased virulence or human-to-human transmissibility.
In addition, research into new therapeutic strategies and the development of universal vaccines (i.e. those effective against all influenza subtypes) remain a priority. We are not one mutation from a pandemic, but the H5N1 virus is certainly not getting any further away.”
to read the full article go to
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-01-mutation-h5n1-bird-flu-pandemic.html
“How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic”
By Jessica Hamzelou
“The good news is that there are already systems in place for tracking the general spread of flu in people. The World Health Organization’s Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System collects and analyzes samples of viruses collected from countries around the world. It allows the organization to make recommendations about seasonal flu vaccines and also helps scientists track the spread of various flu variants. That’s something we didn’t have for the covid-19 virus when it first took off.
We are also better placed to make vaccines. Some countries, including the US, are already stockpiling vaccines that should be at least somewhat effective against H5N1 (although it is difficult to predict exactly how effective they will be against some future variant). The US Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response plans to have “up to 10 million doses of prefilled syringes and multidose vials” prepared by the end of March, according to an email from a representative.
If we want our vaccine production process to be more robust and faster, we’ll have to stop relying on chicken eggs.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/how-us-preparing-potential-bird-flu-pandemic
H5N1: How worried should we be?
By Nora Samaranayake
https://www.usf.edu/health/news/2025/h5n1-update.aspx
