H5N1 has been found in commercially available milk – but gaps in testing of cattle and humans are hampering effort to stop virus
Archived version: https://archive.ph/3fdP3
H5N1 has been found in commercially available milk – but gaps in testing of cattle and humans are hampering effort to stop virus
Archived version: https://archive.ph/3fdP3
While this is certainly a possibility, and we should be prepared for it, there isn’t any indication to think it will suddenly become transmissible between humans this time. There have been over a thousand confirmed cases of H5N1 in humans over the past 20 years, and all were caught directly from an animal and not spread between humans.
This is mostly what I was going for:-). But yeah, you bring up a good perspective: companies aren’t known for paying for things that are not needed, and since the milk is safe after pasteurization…
In my other comment in this thread (I have no idea how to properly make links to comments, without kicking you off your instance to view it), I quoted a linked article describing how the fatality rate was extremely high, as in literally over half - though I did not dig further to see e.g. how many were immunocompromised to begin with.
Thank you for sharing the detail that they all were caught directly from animals. That makes sense:-).
The mortality rate is high, but the sample is also heavily skewed toward low income, rural farming populations in developing countries like Indonesia, Egypt, and Cambodia, where outbreaks of 10-30 cases are not uncommon. Survival rates among the few cases in the US and Europe have been 100%, with one death in Canada
Thank you for the helpful additions there.
Knowing that it’s already been possible for the virus to make the jump, and that there is an upswing of the virus overall, does make it seem quite likely that it will make another jump again soon.
Is there a reason you think it unlikely that once it does so, it will just immediately stop there and not undergo human-to-human transmission?
Because it’s been transmitted to humans over a thousands times over the past 20 years, and this upswing isn’t particularly worse than previous outbreaks, it’s just in the news more because it’s happening in the US. There have been massive avian flu outbreaks before in other countries
if a human is infected with a normal human flu and gets exposed to h5n1 at the same time, stuff could go really bad really quickly