Will Bird Flu Be The Next Pandemic?

From The Walrus: "The Next Pandemic May Already Be Brewing." A good overview of H5N1 bird flu and its slow spread to humans starting with an outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997 and slow spread from Asia to North America. An excerpt:

    Fortunately, when H5N1 causes illness in humans, it’s a one-off. Humans aren’t spreading it to each other. For a pandemic to occur, there must be sustained human-to-human transmission. The worry is, with so much of the virus around, in animals near to us, a pandemic could strike at any time.

    Angela Rasmussen believes a bird flu pandemic would be catastrophic, far worse than COVID-19. She’s a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, who studies how viruses spill over from one species to another. Looking at the numbers of human cases and deaths since the current strain of H5N1 took hold, Rasmussen doubts the case fatality rate would be anywhere near 50 percent. That figure exaggerates the danger, as many mild cases likely have gone unreported. She estimates it would be closer to 2 percent—but on a global scale, it would mean 164 million deaths. Our health care systems would fall apart. The case fatality rate for COVID—which brought much of the world to a standstill and upended economies, schools, and health systems—was less than 1 percent.

    An H5N1 pandemic could be economically disastrous for agriculture, threatening food security worldwide, Rasmussen suggests. Consider that between October 2024 and March 2025 in the US, 50 million sick hens were culled, causing an egg shortage that nearly doubled egg prices. If pigs got infected, there would be wide-scale swine culling. Seeing so many species of birds and mammals already affected also raises environmental concerns.  

    She acknowledges it’s a worst-case apocalyptic vision. “I’m not saying that would happen,” she says, “but there is a version of this that ends with the collapse of human civilization.” 

Despite the scaremongering, the article goes on to describe the difficulty the virus faces in spreading directly from human to human. It then calls for requiring the wide-spread vaccination of domestic fowl. But, of course, the scourge of illegal immigration may play a role in any future pandemic:

Current US immigration policies may be a factor. Dairy and poultry farms rely largely on migrant workers, who may not report symptoms because they fear being sent to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centre. She imagines a scenario where suddenly a cluster of people show up in a hospital and it is discovered, too late, that there’s been community transmission. The pandemic will have begun. ...