Welcome to birdflustocks.com!
With fresh memories of Covid-19, most people refuse to even think about another pandemic. However, there were influenza type A pandemics of H1N1 in 1918, H2N2 in 1957, H3N2 in 1968, and H1N1 in 2009. With around one billion infections and several hundred thousand deaths, the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009 was comparable to "only" an additional "flu season".
H5N1 infections are much more deadly. Every second documented patient died. Widespread human infections combined with double-digit case fatality rates would be catastrophic.
H5N1 continues to spread globally and during all seasons, both is unprecedented. As large numbers of mammals get infected by sick and dead birds, the probability of adaptation to mammals and sustained human-to-human transmission increases.
This website aims to provide all the facts needed for your own risk assessment, based on probability and impact. While the bird flu pandemic may never happen, it could also have a devastating impact, financially and otherwise.
Expert Opinions
Victor Dzau
President of the United States National Academy of Medicine of the United States National Academy of Sciences
"Despite all that was learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is nowhere near ready for an influenza pandemic and must increase our preparations now, and with all urgency."
Source
Ian Brown
Scientific Services Director, Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA)
"We have to consider potentially all species of birds
could have some level of susceptibility, which of course is a new dimension."
Source
Shayan Sharif
Ontario Veterinary College
"I would use just one word to describe it: unprecedented."
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Derek Smith
Director of the Centre for Pathogen Evolution, University of Cambridge
"Vaccines are our best protection - they saved the most lives in the COVID pandemic. There’s no reason why they can’t be made at least that quickly for future pandemics – and there will be another flu pandemic for sure."
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Mathilde Richard
Erasmus Medical Center
"This is the threat that’s going to keep knocking at our door until it will indeed, I assume, cause a pandemic. Because there is no way back."
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Martin Beer
Head of Institute of Diagnostic Virology, Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut
"I think we need the awareness, but it's not the right time to say we are very close to a H5 pandemic, so it's a panzootic and we have to be careful."
Source
Rebecca Poulson
University of Georgia
"We’re worried about these viruses jumping into mammals and then maybe more specifically into humans. I just always like to point out that wildlife is important for its own sake. And this has proved to be a really devastating virus to mammalian and avian species."
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Robert Redfield
Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
"The great pandemic-- it's coming. It's going to be a bird flu pandemic. It's going to be rough. We're going to see some significant mortality
around the world, including the United States."
Source
Thomas Peacock
The Pirbright Instititute
"It continues to be unprecedented. By several measures, we’re at the worst it’s ever been, particularly in terms of geographical spread, how widespread it is in birds and how many mammals are getting infected."
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Lawrence Gostin
Georgetown University
"For many, many decades, these avian and swine influenzas have stayed within the animal kingdom. The hope and the expectation is that it will continue to do that. But one day, that virus will mutate and go to a human, and then spread to a global pandemic very, very quickly. And we have to be ready for that day."
Source
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO)
"For the moment, WHO assesses the risk to humans as low. Since H5N1 first emerged in 1996 we have only seen rare and non-sustained transmission of H5N1 to and between humans, but we cannot assume that will remain the case and we must prepare for any change in the status quo."
Source
Michael Osterholm
Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at University of Minnesota
"At the outset, you have to say there is uncertainty, with one exception: there will be a pandemic."
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Derek Smith
Director of the Centre for Pathogen Evolution, University of Cambridge
"The strain of bird flu in Hong Kong was killing a third of the people it infected. If that could start transmitting directly between humans, it would be a disaster."
Source
Vijay Dhanasekaran
University of Hong Kong
"The shift of the epicenter of these highly pathogenic viruses to new regions has increased the chances of them infecting a wider range of animals, including mammals. Repeated infections in mammals, and in humans, increase the chances of the virus adapting, increasing the likelihood of a pandemic."
Source
Peter Rabinowitz
University of Washington School of Public Health
"It's really an unprecedented outbreak. The number of countries involved, the number of different types of animals involved, both birds and mammals, is something we've absolutely never seen before."
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Chris Walze
Executive Director of Health, Wildlife Conservation Society
"As we continue to monitor the death of innumerable species and track the movement of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) into mammal populations, we must strengthen the focus on integrating the surveillance of emerging influenza clades in wild birds and mammals to support critical vaccine libraries.
H5N1 now presents an existential threat to the world’s biodiversity."
Source
Raina MacIntyre
Kirby Institute
"There has never been a time in the history of HPAI where the risk of a human pandemic is more concerning than it is now."
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Jeremy Farrar
Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO)
"H5N1 is an influenza infection, predominantly started in poultry and ducks and has spread effectively over the course of the last one or two years to become a global zoonotic – animal – pandemic. The great concern, of course, is that in doing so and infecting ducks and chickens - but now increasingly mammals - that that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans. And then critically, the ability to go from human-to-human transmission."
Source
Jeremy Farrar
Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO)
"The mortality rate is extraordinarily high because humans have no natural immunity to the virus"
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Isabella Monne
Head of the viral genomics and transcriptomics laboratory at the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie
"Increasing genetic diversity and geographical distribution of HPAI H5N1 viruses may result in more spillover events in mammals posing great risks not only to the poultry industry but also to wildlife conservation and to human health."
Source
Victor Dzau
President of the United States National Academy of Medicine of the United States National Academy of Sciences
"Influenza viruses are zoonotic in origin and mutate rapidly, regularly creating novel viruses in humans, but the public tends to downplay the seriousness of influenza owing to its seasonal nature and conflation with the common cold. These factors, taken together, have led many experts to believe it is almost certain the world will experience a major influenza pandemic."
Source
Ursula Höfle
Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos
"On one hand, the danger of potentially dangerous variants and on the other hand that the virus changed completely in from what we've been seeing early during limited circulation, spreads and outbreaks generally during winter. Now not only the viruses adapted more to wild birds, and it has gathered force in violence and in spread between wild birds but it's also able to persist longer."
Source
Andy Ramey
United States Geological Survey
"What we’re dealing with now is a scenario that we haven’t dealt with in the past. And so there’s no manual."
Source
Paul Keim
Chair of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB)
"I can't think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one."
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Robert Redfield
Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
"People ask me what keeps me up at night. And the thing that keeps me up at night is just what you brought up, pandemic flu. So I think it's very possible. And we're at risk for another pandemic."
Source
Ron Fouchier
Erasmus University Medical Center
"We’ve never seen such a massive spread of virus in wild birds, and we’ve never seen such massive infections of wild mammals."
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Victor Dzau
President of the United States National Academy of Medicine of the United States National Academy of Sciences
"The devastating potential and likelihood of occurrence of a major influenza pandemic are frightening."
SourceLawrence Gostin
Georgetown University
"Pigs can get avian flu but until recently cattle did not. They were infected with their own strains of the disease. So the appearance of H5N1 in cows was a shock. It means that the risks of the virus getting into more and more farm animals, and then from farm animals into humans just gets higher and higher. The more the virus spreads, then the chances of it mutating so it can spread into humans goes up and up. Basically, we are rolling the dice with this virus."
Source
Ian Brown
Scientific Services Director, Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA)
"That’s the first time in the history of this virus, or group of viruses, that we’ve seen that global spread on such a scale. It’s a gamechanger."
Source
Keith Sumption
Chief Veterinary Officer, FAO
"The epidemiology of H5N1 continues to rapidly evolve."
Source
Gregorio Torres
Head of Science Department, WOAH
"There is a recent paradigm change in the ecology and epidemiology of avian influenza which has heightened global concern as the disease spread to new geographical regions and caused unusual wild bird die-offs, and alarming rise in mammalian cases."
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Caitlin Rivers
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
"I’m keeping a close eye on it as an expert, but as a member of the community, as a parent and someone who has been recently experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m not worried about this right now. This is an animal health issue right now that has a theoretical risk to become a human health issue."
Source
Anthony Fauci
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
"It has the potential to be a major public health threat, but it is unpredictable. So you have to walk that balance of being prepared for something that may not come this year, may not come next year, but sooner or later knowing the history of how pandemic flus evolve over a period of time, over decades and decades, it will occur."
Source
Bob Gerlach
State Veterinarian, State of Alaska
"It’s not going to go away. It’s going to be here, and we have to have some way to deal with it."
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Richard Webby
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
"The more often the virus infects mammals, the greater the risk. It’s a numbers game."
Source
Jonas Waldenström
Linnaeus University
"It’s hard to contain a virus that’s now on more or less all the continents. There’s no putting the lid on that. It will run its course."
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Jeremy Farrar
Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO)
"This is a huge concern and I think we have to make sure that if H5N1 did come across to humans with human-to-human transmission, that we were in a position to immediately respond with access equitably to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics."
Source
Marcela Uhart
UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine
"It is causing a totally unprecedented scale of global spread and mortality. We have never seen anything like this before. It’s killing hundreds of thousands of birds, and tens of thousands of mammals."
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