Can avian flu infect humans?
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Scott LaMar
Airdate: April 3rd, 2023
We are in the midst of the worst outbreak of avian flu in the nation’s history. Avian flu has been diagnosed more than 63 hundred times and almost 60 million birds have been destroyed to stop the spread of the disease.
With the knowledge that it’s a strong possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic began with an animal to human transmission, many have asked whether avian flu could infect humans as well.
Dr. John Goldman, an infectious disease specialist at UPMC, appeared on The Spark Monday to answer that question,”Humans can occasionally be infected with avian flu. Throughout the world, there are reports of transmissions from birds to people. When that occurs, the mortality rate, when it occurs and is recognized, the mortality rate is very high, at least 50%. The good news is that when it is recognized, it is being transferred from birds to people. It usually stops right there. So it doesn’t go from birds to a person and then person to person. You will occasionally see transmission among very close contacts such as family members. But what distinguishes bird flu from something like COVID is that bird flu, when it infects people, does not easily go from person to person. And so as of yet, there is no threat of a widespread outbreak.”
Goldman added,”Often, influenza or other viruses easily transmit from birds to birds, dogs to dogs, pigs to pigs from one species within that species. What we fear is what’s called a pandemic influenza. And that’s when a bird flu infects someone with a human flu. The two combined, and then the bird flu, which is a type of flu we haven’t seen before, easily goes from person to person. That typically happens every 20 to 20 or 30 years. The last time that happened was 2009 with H1N1. And so one of the reasons they are destroying so many birds is, one, to keep the the bird flu from spreading, spreading within flocks of chickens, within commercial farms, but also because if there’s more bird flu around, it will increase the chance that the bird flu will manage to combine with a human flu and then easily go person to person. I want to stress we have not seen that yet, which is very fortunate.”
