Bird Flu Outbreak: Do Human Cases Mean Future Shutdowns?

With bird flu cases continuing to rise across the US and a teenager now in critical condition in Canada after contracting the virus, alarm bells are ringing over just how big the outbreak could become.

So far in 2024, 46 people have been infected with the highly pathogenic H5 strain of bird flu, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). About 25 of these infections have been linked to dairy cattle, 20 to poultry and one case in Missouri arose from an unknown source.

As for the teenager in Canada, who was described as “healthy before this” during a press conference on Tuesday, the source of the infection is also unknown. They had no exposure to farms where the virus is most prevalent.

A recent outbreak at a pig farm in Oregon – the first of its kind in the United States – raised further concerns, as pigs are well known for transmitting diseases to humans.

According to the CDC, the risk to the public remains low and no cases of human-to-human transmission have been reported so far.

But with each human infection, the virus gets another opportunity to mutate and learn to spread among the population in the process. According to experts, if human-to-human transmission were to occur, the effects would be uncertain – but potentially pandemic-causing.

“Prior to COVID, influenza has been the cause of most of the recent recorded pandemics that we know of,” Jeremy Rossman, an associate professor of virology at the University of Kent in the UK, told Newsweek.

Rossman explained that the risk of influenza pandemics is therefore very high, but that bird flu is a big unknown. Because the population has not been exposed to H5 bird flu, immunity will be much lower than with other strains of flu.

He added: “We just don’t know what it would look like, and that’s the biggest concern.”

The need for a lockdown would depend on what form the mutation that gives bird flu the ability to transmit among humans would take.

“If we start to have human-to-human transmission, especially into the winter in the United States, when flu spreads best anyway, there’s a very high chance that this virus will start to spread,” Rossman said.

“Now the implications of that are not clear, because bird flu historically can have up to 60 percent mortality. But we don’t see that even with contagious cases from cattle here.”

In the United States, human cases to date have generally been mild, according to the CDC, with most infected individuals exhibiting little more than conjunctivitis and mild flu-like respiratory symptoms.

“It’s possible that the adaptation to humans might restore some virulence, but it’s also possible that you end up with H5N1 that spreads from person to person that still causes mild disease,” Rossman said.

“We just don’t know what it would be like if we actually got this human-transmissible bird flu.”

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