By Alice Park
“As bird flu continues to ramp up, many are wondering what tools—namely, vaccines—we have to fight it if such intervention becomes necessary.”
“What about an mRNA vaccine for H5N1?
There isn’t one yet, but several companies—including Moderna, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (in collaboration with CureVac)—are working on such a shot. In July, the U.S. government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) awarded Moderna $176 million to develop its updated mRNA H5N1 vaccine. All of the mRNA vaccine candidates are in early stages of testing in people for safety and efficacy.”
to read the full article go to
https://time.com/7203820/h5n1-new-bird-flu-vaccine-update/
“Experts Warn of Growing Risks as Bird Flu Cases Rise”
By India Edwards
““The risk is really going to come when this gets better at obviously infecting humans, and then we are faced with potential for human-to-human transmission,” Marrazzo said.
Even though there aren’t many human cases, experts say the persistent detection of H5N1 in humans and animals is troubling. “This virus doesn’t miss a beat,” Marrazzo concluded.”go
to read the full article go to
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-01-02/experts-warn-of-growing-risks-as-bird-flu-cases-rise
“Bird Flu Warning Over New Virus Risk: ‘Significant Public Health Concern’”
“The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises on their website that Americans, particularly those at high risk of bird flu such as farmworkers, should get the flu vaccine this season, even though it only prevents seasonal flu.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.newsweek.com/bird-flu-warning-virus-mutation-public-health-2008528
“Surge in seasonal flu in Southern California may lead to potential bird flu mutation”
“There’s a ton of flu,” he said. “And mark my words, when kids go back to school in a week or two, those numbers are going to go off the charts.”
to read the full article go to
https://abc7.com/post/southern-california-faces-dual-flu-threats-surge-seasonal-may-lead-potential-bird-mutation/15738636/
“FDA begins testing aged raw cow’s milk cheese samples nationwide for bird flu”
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/fda-testing-aged-raw-cows-milk-cheese-bird-flu/story?id=117222065
By Michael G. Ison, M.D. and Jeanne Marrazzo, M.D., M.P.H.
From the Respiratory Diseases Branch, Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (M.G.I.), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health (J.M.), Bethesda, MD.
“……The past weeks have seen more cases detected in more states as well as more persons with respiratory illness acquired through exposure to poultry or from an unknown source. Without a clearer understanding of the extent of exposure, infection, viral evolution, and transmission, we will be unable to properly protect our communities from a pathogen that has proven to be a formidable challenge to human and animal health.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2416323
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 been concerned but not worried. That has changed recently. While nobody can predict what will come, I want to explain why my sense of unease has increased markedly in recent days.”
This isn’t the first time bird flu has circulated in animals, though the outbreak that began in 2024 is certainly the largest documented one. But that alone isn’t enough to warrant panic. An emerging potential epidemic demands our attention—and our full resources—when two features start changing for the worse: severity and transmissibility.”
to read the full article go to
https://slate.com/technology/2024/12/bird-flu-emergency-physician-worried-transmission-cases.html
“CDC Issues Update On Bird Flu ‘Mutations’ In Humans”
By Hannah Parry
“The CDC told Newsweek Monday that while bird flu’s current risk to the general public remains low, the agency is carefully monitoring for several red flags that could indicate that the virus could be on the verge of becoming a pandemic.
Those red flags include any outbreaks of bird flu that are spread from person-to-person, as well as evidence that the virus has mutated, making it easier for it to spread between humans.
“Identifying epidemiologically linked clusters of influenza A(H5N1) human cases might indicate the virus is better able to spread between humans,” a spokesperson from the CDC A(H5N1) Bird Flu Response team told Newsweek via email.
Increased cases of humans catching bird flu from animals may also indicate the virus “is adapting to spread more easily from animals to people,” they added.
to read the full article go to
https://www.newsweek.com/bird-flu-update-cdc-red-flags-2007711
“CDC Reports Potentially Troublesome Mutations in Bird Flu Found in Louisiana Patient”
By India Edwards
“Federal health officials have confirmed unsettling new details about the first United States case of severe bird flu, reported recently in a hospitalized patient in Louisiana….
Importantly, these mutations were observed in the later stages of infection and were not present in the virus samples taken from the backyard poultry flock that infected the patient, a media report from The New York Times shows.
This suggests that the changes occurred as the virus adapted to its human host, rather than spreading widely in nature, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an update published Dec. 26.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2024-12-30/cdc-reports-potentially-troublesome-mutations-in-bird-flu-found-in-louisiana-patient
“Novel bird flu strain continues to threaten animal, public health”
By R. Scott Nolen and Malinda Larkin
“As the epizootic of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI, more specifically avian influenza type A H5N1) spreading globally approaches its fourth year, animal and public health officials are monitoring how quickly a new variant of the H5N1 virus—the clade 2.3.4.4b viruses—can jump to new animals, including people.
Given H5N1’s circulation among wild and migratory bird populations, along with clade 2.3.4.4b’s knack for infecting a broad range of mammalians species and the associated morbidity and mortality rates, experts worry H5N1 will eventually mutate into a lethal strain capable of human-to-human transmission, setting off another pandemic.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.avma.org/news/novel-bird-flu-strain-continues-threaten-animal-public-health
“Experts Lament ‘Anemic’ Response to H5N1, Worried About What 2025 Will Bring”
by Kristina Fiore
“This year, human cases of H5N1 bird flu ramped up in the U.S., particularly after the virus made its way into dairy cattle herds. In this report, experts share their concerns about what may happen with H5N1 in the year ahead.
The Biden administration’s response to H5N1 avian influenza, or bird flu, has been lackluster, and infectious disease experts said they are on edge about how the response to the virus will be handled in a second Trump administration
“I don’t think H5N1 has been managed very well in the Biden-Harris administration, and probably will only get worse during the Trump administration, if we can judge by some of their COVID policies, as well as some of the people who are going to be put in charge of agencies,” Amesh Adalja, MD, of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, told MedPage Today.
James Lawler, MD, MPH, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security in Omaha, agreed that the current response “has been incredibly anemic.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/uritheflu/113584
How Alarming Is the H5N1 Bird-Flu Mutation in Louisiana?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/h5n1-bird-flu-mutation-louisiana.html
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 it was focused on afflictions that plague the poorest people in the most marginalized places, but it had enormous impact.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Carter decided to focus on neglected tropical diseases, which draw little investment in research or treatment because they infect the poorest people in the poorest countries.
The Carters learned about Guinea worm, an excruciating and disabling parasitic infection in which a three-foot-long worm slowly burrows out through the skin of the person it has infected, and for which there is no treatment other than painstakingly drawing out the worm over days or weeks. With Dr. Foege and his team, the Carters set the goal of eliminating the disease.
Mr. Carter did not, as he often vowed to do, live long enough to see eradication. But in 1986, when they began the campaign, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases in at least 21 countries. This year, as of early December, the Carter Center reported a provisional total of just 11 cases.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/health/jimmy-carter-global-health.html
lth.html
“How Jimmy Carter’s legacy as a public health visionary benefits the world”
by Robert W. Amler
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5059833-jimmy-carter-public-health-impact
America Still Needs Jimmy Carter’s Health Care Agenda—Even If It Flopped
By Guian McKee / Made by History
https://time.com/6338230/jimmy-carter-dies-health-care/
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 to characterize the cases and their severity.”
“”We should be having rapid tests, home tests, available to all farm workers, to their families, for the clinicians taking care of them, so that we aren’t waiting for public labs and CDC labs to tell us what’s bird flu or not,” she added.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/leana-wen-bird-flu-testing-h5n1-virus-face-the-nation/
“Bird Flu Samples From Very Ill Patient Had ‘Concerning’ Mutations”
By Benjamin Mueller
“After someone in southwest Louisiana was hospitalized with a severe case of bird flu, the first such illness reported in the United States, health workers swabbed the person’s nose and throat, looking for genetic clues about the virus.
On Thursday, federal health officials reported some unsettling results. Some of the genetic samples contained mutations that in theory might help the bird flu virus, H5N1, infect people more easily.”
to read the full article go to
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/27/health/bird-flu-mutations-louisiana.html
“How America lost control of the bird flu and raised the risk of another pandemic”
By Amy Maxmen
“To understand how the bird flu got out of hand, KFF Health News interviewed nearly 70 government officials, farmers and farmworkers, and researchers with expertise in virology, pandemics, veterinary medicine, and more.
Together with emails obtained from local health departments through public records requests, this investigation revealed key problems, including deference to the farm industry, eroded public health budgets, neglect for the safety of agriculture workers, and the sluggish pace of federal interventions.”
““We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.””
to read the full article go to
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-america-lost-control-of-the-bird-flu-and-raised-the-risk-of-another-pandemic
Bird flu mutations raise fears of a broader outbreak
By 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 know from other viruses that a lot of the spread can be asymptomatic. So we kind of have our head in the sand about how widespread this is from the zoonotic standpoint, from the animal to human standpoint.”
“Scott Gottlieb, another health policy veteran from Trump’s first administration, echoed Birx’s warning of inadequate testing in posts on X this week, writing that if H5N1 ultimately develops into a pandemic, “The U.S. will have only itself to blame.”
to read the full article go to.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/27/bird-flu-mutations-outbreak-00196069
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 insufficient planning and stockpiling of vaccines and therapies. That poor performance cuts across political parties, the federal interagency, and state leadership. Multiple players have sought to downplay the threat: the dairy industry fears further economic setbacks, state leaders are wary of federal intervention, and the Biden administration did not want to aggravate relations during the 2024 election cycle.”
to read the full article go to
https://features.csis.org/US-bird-flu-response/
“Why scientists say we are fighting H5N1 bird flu with one hand tied behind our backs”
By Susanne Rust and Karen Kaplan
“Gain-of-function research became controversial during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But without it, “we’re just flying in the dark” when it comes to H5N1, said Felicia Goodrum, a molecular virologist at the University of Arizona.
But when, where and how that could come to pass is hard to predict — in part, some researchers say, because of guardrails the federal government has placed around gain-of-function research.
The term describes experiments that seek to understand a virus’ potential to adapt to new hosts, spread more easily, survive longer in the environment and cause those infected to become sicker. Though many scientists view the approach as a critical tool for conducting biological research, other experts have long complained that it’s unacceptably risky — a reputation exacerbated by persistent speculation that the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic was created in gain-of-function experiments in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
to read the full article go
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-12-24/restrictions-on-gain-of-function-research-have-hobbled-h5n1-bird-flu-fight
“MPOX: Five Ways Children are More at Risk from the Virus”
https://www.savethechildren.org/us/charity-stories/mpox-virus-ways-children-are-at-risk
“Mpox: Belgium Detects First Case Of Clade 1b Strain; WHO Tags It As ‘Especially Concerning’”
https://www.thehealthsite.com/news/mpox-belgium-detects-first-case-of-clade-1b-strain-who-tags-it-as-especially-concerning-1166586/
“Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots”
By Rosemary Westwood
“A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.
Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.”
