By Jeremy Samuel Faust “All year, I’ve been keeping tabs on the H5N1 avian flu outbreak in dairy cattle and birds in the United States. As a frontline emergency physician, my stake in this is clear: I want to know if there is an imminent threat of a sustained deadly outbreak in people.Until now, I’ve
By Stephanie Nolen “Jimmy Carter’s five decades of leadership in global health brought a hideous disease to the brink of elimination, helped deliver basic health and sanitation to millions of people and set a new standard for how aid agencies should engage with the countries they assist.It was quiet work and drew relatively little attention because
By Patrick Maguire “Dr. Leana Wen said Sunday that the lack of testing for bird flu doesn’t mean that the virus isn’t alive in humans, and that she feels the federal government “should have learned our lesson from COVID” and should be proactive in making tests available for Americans — and not wait for labs
Bird flu mutations raise fears of a broader outbreakBy Alice Miranda Ollstein ““Our No. 1 principle in preventing pandemics is detect, and if you go to the CDC website, you can see that they are monitoring more than 10,000 exposures, but they’ve only tested 530,” she said. “That means we’re not testing enough. And we
By Michaela Simoneau, Sophia Hirshfield, and Maclane Speer “Since the turn of the century, every presidential administration has highlighted gaps in U.S. public health capabilities, and every Congress has left them underfunded. The H5N1 outbreak has revealed the resulting and dangerous shortcomings in U.S. pandemic preparedness: lagging data, incomplete surveillance, sluggish coordination, considerable mistrust, and
By Evan Bush “To better understand the geography of bird flu’s spread, scientists are monitoring wastewater for fragments of the virus. “We’ve seen detections in a lot more places, and we’ve seen a lot more frequent detections” in recent months, said Amy Lockwood, the public health partnerships lead at Verily, a company that provides wastewater testing
By Janet Loehrkehttps://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/12/21/bird-flu-h5n1-avian-influenza-maps/77100793007/ “US has first severe bird flu case. When should we start to worry?”By Eduardo Cuevas and Adrianna Rodriguezhttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/12/21/first-severe-bird-flu-case-pandemic/77103005007/ “Kennedy Wants to Overhaul the F.D.A. Here’s How Experts Would Change It.While some agree with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the agency needs reform, their ideas for fixing it are v ery different from