For the short answer, the TL;DR; version, the answer is potentially yes, but don’t panic … yet.
COVID is now thankfully under control due to our ability to rapidly create and distribute vaccines that worked very well. It caught many by surprise because it rapidly emerged and spread, and so people are now appropriately conscious of what can happen. Due to this social awareness, stories about the transmission of Bird Flu (H5N1) to humans resonate and cause deep concern.
Will 2025 see the rapid emergence of Bird Flu?
The CDC sums the situation up as follows …
- H5 bird flu is widespread in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows with several recent human cases in U.S. dairy and poultry workers.
- While the current public health risk is low, CDC is watching the situation carefully and working with states to monitor people with animal exposures.
- CDC is using its flu surveillance systems to monitor for H5 bird flu activity in people.
So far there have been 66 humans cases in 2024 and most of those have been via exposure from infected cattle or poultry.
- 40 via cattle
- 23 poultry
- 1 other
- 2 unknown source
OK, so there are a few details worth understanding here.
So far this is simply spillover. There is no human to human transmission taking place.
The fact that H5N1 has also been infecting cattle is a recent development, hence we should be appropriately concerned because this is not business as usual, it has evolved. While 2024 has seen 66 human cases, in the two years prior to 2024 there had only been three, so that also is a dramatic change.
Why the spillover?
In most of the recent cases it happened because farm workers were drinking raw milk from infected cattle.
Yikes!
Side note: We pasteurize milk for a reason. Please do not buy into the current fad of raw milk being better for you. That claim is BS. Drinking raw milk greatly increases your risk of something very nasty getting into your system and impacting your health.
Just to drive this point home, the scientific evidence via studies is very very clear …
(Rant mode on) …
- Raw milk does not cure lactose intolerance.
- Raw milk does not cure or treat asthma and allergy.
- Raw milk is not more effective in preventing osteoporosis than pasteurized milk.
- There are no beneficial bacteria in raw milk for gastrointestinal health.
- Raw milk is not an immune system building food and is particularly unsafe for children.
- There are no immunoglobulins in raw milk that enhance the human immune system.
- There are no additional protease and lipases in raw milk that facilitate milk digestion.
- Raw milk is not nutritionally superior to pasteurized milk.
- Raw milk does not contain natural antimicrobial components that make milk safe.
- Raw milk does not contain nisin for pathogen inhibition.
- Folate binding protein (FBP) is not denatured during pasteurization and folate utilization is not reduced in pasteurized milk.
- Pasteurized milk is safer than raw milk.
- Raw milk causes a greater rate of foodborne outbreaks than pasteurized milk.
- Raw milk produced under HACCP does not make it safe to drink.
RFK Jnr may indeed try to lead an all out assault against public health by doing crazy stuff such as changing the rules and encouraging the consumption of raw milk, but remember that this is a guy who ended up with a worm parasite in his brain.
OK, back on topic.
As I mentioned above, the rather good news at the moment is the H5N1 does not transmit from person to person.
Why?
The way that an influenza virus works is that it attaches to sialic receptors on the outside of cells so that it can then get inside and start replicating. H5N1 has evolved to recognise bird sialic receptors and bind to those. For humans that binding between H5N1 and human cells often results in mismatches, hence it can’t easily spread from human to human.
However, here is the scary bit – a recent study demonstrated that H5N1 is just a one mutation away within its DNA from adapting to human transmission.
If that should happen, then we need to rapidly respond to control the spread. It could very easily happen due to all those raw milk consumers giving it access to human DNA for it to adapt to.
A sense of awareness and alertness for this is vitally important to the CDC – monitoring what is happening matters, and then responding if it should happen is crucial.
Why?
H5N1 has a 30% fatality in humans, if it spread as COVID did then the consequences are indeed dire.
Knowing what you know about the incoming administration, then being more than a little bit worried is wholly appropriate for what are, I hope, obvious reasons.
A Bit more recent history about H5N1
As recently as Oct 2022 things changed. There was an outbreak of H5N1 on a Spanish mink farm. This was the first even mammal-to-mammal transmission. The presumed source was from seabirds in the area that were infected with H5N1.
A couple of months later in Dec 2022 there was an outbreak amongst seals along the coast of the Caspian sea. This raised concerns that the mammal-to-mammal transmission was spreading to other species.
There was a similar die off of elephant seal pups in 2023. As the year proceeded, roughly about 24,000 South American sea lions died from H5N1.
In April 2024 H5N1 spread amongst dairy cows within nine US states. This was a very strong indication that cow-to-cow transmission was now also happening. In the case of cow infections mortality was rare and so the big issue was the shading of viable H5N1 virus into milk. That was the source for 40 people to become infected by ingesting this raw milk. It is also common for cats on dairy farms to be fed with raw milk. Around 50% of the cats fed raw unpasteurised milk produced by the infected cows died within days.
As you can imagine, the deep concern here is the emergence of a variation of H5N1 that enables human-to-human transmission.
Will we be OK if there is no Human-to-Human transmission?
No.
What is highly possible is that in 2025 H5N1 may have a huge impact upon our domesticated animals. This has the potential to both disrupt food supply and thus we would all feel the economic impact if that should happen.
Bottom Line
In normal times this would all be a huge concern. However, given the desire of the new Trump administration to decimate vast swathes of the federal infrastructure, the deep risk is that the eyes we have watching, monitoring, and measuring all this will be blinded.
Should the worst happen, those that would then swing into action with the appropriate health measures will also have been eliminated.
While right now the actual risk is not immediate, the distinct and increasing possibility of it means we really should be keeping our eye on it all. The one thing you can depend upon the new Trump administration to do is to complete drop the ball on this. You need not doubt that reality, because they will be fully staffed with the most incompetent, inept, and scientifically illiterate individuals available.
Now might be a good time for you to stock up on toilet paper, which is just metaphorical way of saying that you should get ready to do whatever you have to do to be prepared for another COVID like pandemic, but without a competent government in place.
If
In 1910, English poet Rudyard Kipling published a rather famous poem called “If”.
Permit me to paraphrase it a bit for you …
If you can keep your head while everybody around you is panicking, and running around screaming in fear … then clearly there is something going on that you have failed to truly grasp.
In the news
Here are a few recent H5N1 items …