‘This could be 100 times worse than Covid’: Bird flu warning from scientists who say HALF of H5N1 infections in humans are fatal – as White House says it is ‘monitoring’ the situation

A bird flu pandemic could be ‘100 times worse than Covid’ and kill up to half of everyone it catches, experts warn – as the White House says it is ‘monitoring’ the situation.

At a briefing, virus researchers said the H5N1 variant of bird flu could now come “dangerously close” to causing a pandemic.

Multiple cases of infection in a variety of mammals, including cows, cats and, more recently, humans, all increase the risk of the virus mutating and becoming more transmissible, they said.

But others who attended the briefing said it was too early to panic as there were still too many unknowns about recent cases to raise the alarm.

A White House representative said today that it is monitoring bird flu in the US, adding: “We take the health and safety of the American people seriously.”

The panel was quickly convened following news that a Texas dairy farm worker tested positive for the virus, joining 12 herds of cows in six states and three cats also in Texas that subsequently died.

Tests on the worker showed that the patient’s virus had already mutated to spread more easily — although the CDC said this mutation had been previously recorded, the risk was low and there was no sign of human-to-human transmission .

The briefing was attended by bird flu researchers, doctors and officials from government agencies who were alarmed by the case of bird flu in a human.

John Fulton, a pharmaceutical industry vaccine consultant and founder of Canada-based pharmaceutical company BioNiagara, organized the meeting after receiving questions from the media.

During the briefing, Dr. Suresh Kuchipudi, a bird flu researcher in Pittsburgh, warned: ‘This virus (has) been at the top of the list of pandemics for many, many years and probably decades.

“And now we’re getting dangerously close to this virus potentially causing a pandemic.”

He added: ‘H5N1 viruses have done that have already demonstrated several important characteristics of a potential pandemic virus.

‘So this is the case: the virus has already spread globally, and this virus in particular, which is often thought of as an avian virus, can, and has demonstrated, the ability to infect a range of mammalian hosts, including humans.

‘We are not really talking about a virus that has yet to make a leap, but about a virus that is present worldwide, already infecting and circulating a whole range of mammals.

“So that’s why I think this is, in my opinion, a virus with the greatest pandemic threat (i.e.) happening in plain sight and having a global presence.”

“It’s really high time we were prepared.”

His concerns were echoed by Fulton, who warned that the H5N1 variant of influenza A could cause a worse pandemic than Covid.

He said: ‘This appears to be a hundred times worse than Covid, or it could be if it mutates and maintains the high death rate.

“Once it has mutated to infect humans, we can only hope that the mortality rate goes down.”

The World Health Organization estimates the fatality rate for H5N1 at 52 percent, based on the 462 deaths recorded since 2003 among the 887 people diagnosed with the virus.

By comparison, Covid currently kills less than 0.1 percent of the people it infects, although this was around 20 percent at the start of the pandemic.

Since 2020, when the new strain of bird flu emerged and spread around the world, seven of the 26 people infected with H5N1 have died — or nearly 30 percent.

Some experts warn that in more severe but rare cases, H5N1 can infect the respiratory tract and cause pneumonia. It can also infect other areas, such as the eyes, where it causes inflammation.

Dr. Gabriel Girouard, a microbiologist in New Brunswick, warned that the mortality rate from H5N1 is currently around 50 percent, although there are few human cases.

But he said if the virus started spreading between people, it would likely “decline” but would still “remain high.”

Newer infectious diseases have a high mortality rate because people do not yet have defenses against them, allowing the virus to evade the immune system and cause a more serious infection.

However, other experts attending the panel called for calm, including David Swayne, who has worked on bird flu infections in animals for decades.

He said: “At the moment there is no knowledge of the cattle cases, so it is easy to raise the alarm.

‘There is a major knowledge gap that we need to fill.

“Let’s look at the facts and look at them with reason. We don’t know much these days because of the knowledge gaps we have to fill.’

Dr. Francois Balloux, an epidemiologist in Britain, added this morning on can happen to us, except that it sucks their lives, much more than it should.’

To become a pandemic, a virus must be able to easily infect people or animals and spread between them.

But researchers have yet to determine whether the virus can now spread from mammal to mammal – with studies looking at infected cattle.

The White House press secretary today, when asked about the US bird flu outbreak, said: “This is something we’re certainly keeping an eye on.

“We did that, the CDC worked on this and focused on this.

“We take the health and safety of the American people seriously. It’s very important to this president. Our top priority is to keep communities healthy, safe and informed.”

So far, 12 farms in six states have reported H5N1 infections in their cows – including five in Texas, as well as farms in New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio, Idaho and Kansas. Cows in Iowa are also being tested.

Infected cattle are described as ‘sleepy’, eat less food and produce less milk. But they don’t die from their infections.

But it’s not clear how the cows became infected, whether through exposure to infected feces, bird carcasses or some other route.

It is also unclear whether the virus spreads between the animals or whether they are infected by a single source, such as their feed. Most cases nationwide have been traced to Texas farms.

For the human case, there are also many unknowns, including how the patient became infected.

It can come from direct contact with cows or from touching a surface contaminated with the virus and then touching their face.

While many mammals become infected, experts say there is one species in particular they are targeting: pigs.

These animals have the same receptors in their lungs as humans, meaning an outbreak among them could portend a similar episode in humans.

But no infections in pigs are currently recorded.

However, a person in Pennsylvania was diagnosed with swine flu infection earlier this year and was hospitalized, but made a full recovery. The individual had close contact with pigs and was infected with the H1N2 strain of influenza A, which is slightly different from H5N1.

Scientists warn that pigs can become infected with human and bird flu viruses at the same time, which can then swap genes – in a process called reassortment – ​​to create a new version of the virus.

However, the situation potentially has a wider impact than just causing panic, as the price of milk and eggs is also likely to rise.

Milk from infected cows cannot be sold, while egg farms must cull all their birds if bird flu is detected – which takes months to recover from.

This was behind the rise in egg prices in 2020, when the price of a dozen large Grade A eggs rose from $1.72 to $3.59 over the year to November 2022.

At their peak, they reached $4.82 for a dozen eggs.

Officials say there is a very low risk of contracting bird flu from milk because almost all of the supply is pasteurized, which inactivates viruses and bacteria before the milk goes to stores.

Bird flu began to take off in 2020 after a wild bird flu MIXED genes with a version of the virus from domestic poultry.

The disease spread quickly through migratory birds and in May 2021 it was confirmed that the bird had crossed the line between birds and mammals for the first time – after two baby foxes in the Netherlands tested positive for the disease.

One died from the infection, while the other was euthanized due to symptoms. The route of infection was not confirmed, but scientists said it likely occurred through eating the carcass of an infected bird.

In January 2022, the first human case was diagnosed: 79-year-old Alan Gosling from Great Britain.