US urged to ramp up bird flu defence after recording its first human death
After the United States recorded its first human death from bird flu, calls for the government to do more has intensified.
Eggs options are limited and increasingly expensive for grocery shoppers across the US amid the ongoing bird flu outbreak. Photo: Dreamstime/TNSAhead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, health experts have amplified their demands for the government to stave off the threat of another pandemic. These calls come after the United States recorded its first human death from bird flu.
Specialists from around the world have been urging US authorities for months to increase surveillance and share more information about its bird flu outbreak. In particular, calls have come after the virus started spreading among dairy cows for the first time.
Louisiana health authorities reported that a patient aged over 60 was the country’s first person to die from bird flu. The patient, who contracted avian influenza after being exposed to infected birds, had underlying medical conditions, US health authorities said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has maintained that bird flu’s risk to the general population is low, and there is no evidence that it has been transmitted between people.
However, health experts have been sounding the alarm about the potential pandemic threat of bird flu, particularly as it has shown signs of mutating in mammals into a form that could spread more easily among humans.
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The avian influenza variant H5N1 was first detected in 1996, but a record global outbreak in 2020 has resulted in hundreds of millions of poultry birds being culled – and killed an unknown but massive number of wild birds.
In March of last year, the virus started transmitting between dairy cows in the United States.
Since the start of 2024, 66 bird flu cases have been recorded in humans in the United States, many of them among farm workers, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The US cases had been relatively mild until the Louisiana patient, although a Canadian teenager has become severely ill. Nearly half of the 954 human cases of H5N1 recorded since 2003 have been fatal, according to the WHO.
Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the Erasmus University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, emphasised that the public should not be unduly worried about another pandemic.
“The problem is that this is how it could start,” she added.
Koopmans criticised the authorities, saying “there is not really an effort to contain” the bird flu outbreak among cattle in the United States.
Tom Peacock, a virologist at the Imperial College London, said he thought “the biggest error the US has made is its slow and weak response to the cattle outbreak”.
The reason bird flu has affected US cattle seemed to be a combination of this weak early response, poor biosecurity “and the intensification of US dairy farming [which involves far more movement of animals than any European system]”, he told Agence France-Presse.
Peacock was a co-author of a preprint study released on Monday – which has not been peer-reviewed – describing how the mutations of H5N1 in cattle enhance its ability to infect other mammals, including humans.
Rebecca Christofferson, a scientist at Louisiana State University, said there were signs that the deceased patient’s virus mutated while they were infected – but it was not transmitted to anyone else.
“The worry is, the more you let this sort of run wild … the more chances you have for this sort of mutation not only to occur but to then get out and infect someone else, starting a chain reaction,” she told Agence France-Presse.
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said the United States “are doing a lot of surveillance” on bird flu. “That’s why we’re hearing about it,” she added.
Last week, the US government awarded an additional US$306 million (HK$2.38 billion) to strengthen H5N1 surveillance programmes and research.
Peacock said monitoring has increased for US cattle but warned “big gaps” remain.