by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., Childrens Health Defense:
New York City officials are planning a tabletop simulation later this month to prepare for a hypothetical bird flu outbreak, a city health official revealed at the International Bird Flu Summit, taking place this week in Fairfax, Virginia.
New York City officials are planning a tabletop simulation later this month to prepare for a hypothetical bird flu outbreak, a city health official revealed at the International Bird Flu Summit, taking place this week in Fairfax, Virginia.
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The summit is sponsored by Gingko Biosecurity, which says it is “building and deploying the next-generation infrastructure and technologies that global leaders need to predict, detect, and respond to a wide variety of biological threats.”
Public health officials, doctors, scientists, researchers and pharmaceutical company representatives convened at the summit amid more reports of bird flu hotspots, including a cluster of eight possible bird flu cases in Missouri.
According to U.S. News & World Report, the Missouri cases “could be the first cases of bird flu spreading between humans in the United States.”
Italy and Hungary recently announced they detected bird flu outbreaks at farms, Reuters reported. According to CBS News, bird flu killed 47 tigers, three lions and a panther at zoos in Vietnam.
Epidemiologist Nicholas Hulscher told The Defender that the Missouri and other global outbreaks are not concerning.
“The current outbreaks of H5N1 among animal populations have not resulted in mass mortality with the exception of government-mandated culling,” Hulscher said. “Genotype B3.13, the currently circulating strain in U.S. cattle, is currently a very mild illness for humans. There has never been a reported human H5N1 death in the U.S.”
Dr. Clayton J. Baker, an internal medicine physician, told The Defender the latest news reports strike him “as classic ‘fear porn.’” He noted that before the U.S. News & World Report story, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report stating that only one H5N1 case in humans had been detected in Missouri.
Journalist and author John Leake is attending the Bird Flu Summit. He told The Defender that while mainstream media reports are hyping purported bird flu outbreaks, the atmosphere at the summit is subdued, albeit aligned with the prevailing narrative.
“They’re following, I’d say, the narrative that we’ve been treated to all year, that this new H5N1 is jumping from birds into mammals — for example, dairy cattle, marine mammals, which are genetically, genomically far closer to humans,” Leake said.
“So, the prevailing orthodoxy is that this pathogenic avian influenza is getting closer to making the evolutionary jump from animals into humans. And if that happens, it’s going to place a big burden on human health and the public healthcare system,” Leake added.
As for the Missouri outbreak, Leake said it’s been a topic of discussion at the summit — but no evidence has been presented to confirm that human-to-human bird flu transmission has occurred.
In addition to the news about New York City’s planned bird flu simulation, the topic of gain-of-function research involving the H5N1 virus came up, with some attendees speculating that the current predominant H5N1 strain may be a product of such research.
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