Should We Be Worried About Avian Flu?
Recent developments called “incredibly concerning”
The deadly H5N1 avian flu that’s decimated global bird populations and made your morning omelette a luxury item may be one step closer to infecting humans.
After decades of dooming, I can smirk in the face of nuclear war and grin wanly at the scythe-bearing spectre of catastrophic climate change. However, now that Covid’s revealed how poorly we deal with a lethal, rapidly spreading virus, the pandemic stuff scares the shit out of me.
In November of 2022, there was an outbreak of H5N1 avian flu at a mink farm in Spain which resulted in the culling of some fifty thousand mink. Like me, most of you are probably not minks, so after shedding a tear for the cutting short of all those brief factory-farmed lives, you may be wondering why you should care.
The concern here is that it’s a virtual certainty that the outbreak was spread via mink-to-mink transmission, rather than bird-to-mink. Transmission of avian flu directly between mammals is vanishingly rare, and if there’s a new strain that can do it easily, it would bode poorly for the planet’s apex mammal. In the case of the mink farm, genetic sequencing has uncovered a mutation which may or may not make it easier for the virus to attach itself to humans. Researchers are…
