The Next Pandemic May Already Be Here: It’s Time to Take Our Heads Out of the H5N1 Sand Before it is Too Late

A strain of avian flu that had not previously detected in humans took the life of a person in Mexico, and last Thursday, a third human case of H5N1 was detected in a farmworker in Michigan and this case was dramatically different than the first two.
The quick evolutions we are now seeing in avian flue may just be the tip of the iceberg, a harbinger of things to come. At best, I can say to fasten your seatbelt as it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
The death in Mexico was the first confirmed human case of H5N2, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. It’s important to note that H5N2 differs from the strain currently infecting cattle and it was not known to infect humans. The deceased was  a 59-year-old male with no previous exposure to poultry or other animals. He died on April 28.
This third H5N1 patient – the first human to experience respiratory symptoms from H5N1 – tells us that the current bird flu situation is at a dangerous inflection point.
“With this case, the respiratory symptoms occurred right after exposure to an infected cow,” Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement. She added that the patient had not been wearing any protective gear.
Patient Nr. 3’s symptoms show us that the virus is adapting in predictable ways that increase its risk to humans, and it reflects our failure to contain the virus early on.
We’ve long since known that H5N1 was more than a bird disease: It has managed to infect 69 herds of cattle in nine states since the end of March. And these are the infections we know of. Now there have been three human cases and the newest one shows that the virus is adapting to better infect our species. It’s not just that the third patient has respiratory symptoms, namely that he is coughing. It’s that coughing is a more effective means of spreading the virus than, for example, what the first two patients had, which was an eye infection.
One line of defense has been conspicuously absent here and that is serology testing. Serology testing in the initial years of the coronavirus pandemic were crucial to containing the spread of the virus. Not knowing the spread of H5N1 is already hindering our ability to understand the spread of the virus and to respond accordingly as well as to predict the direction that this is heading.
When you lack this knowledge, you lack the ability to allocate resources or to even determine the resources needed.
Any questions? For once, I truly hope not.