OPINION: Why You Should Care More About Bird Flu

The avian influenza is worrying experts because it is not slowing down. (Source: Wikipedia Commons) 

Around the world, avian influenza (“bird flu”) cases have been surging, with the virus being detected in more than 108 countries across five continents. However, unlike previous outbreaks, this one might cause a global pandemic.

The virus—which is usually transmitted between birds—has shown a significant uptake in mammals over the last several years, especially in 2024. Since 2022, more than 19 countries in three continents have reported mammalian outbreaks of bird flu, with a particularly high concentration of cases in the Americas and Europe.

The virus also shows no signs of slowing, with the number of infected species with the H5N1 strain going from one (black-backed gulls) in 2021 to over 500 bird species and 70 mammal species by the end of 2024.

Yet, despite the growing threat, much of the public discussion and reporting around avian influenza has ignored the crux of the issue. “A review of the year’s coverage underscores that the world is not adequately paying attention or preparing for a potential H5N1 pandemic threat,” the Pandemic Action Network has reported.

The majority of stories on bird flu from global media organizations have focused on egg prices, chicken slaughter practices, and cases solely in the United States. For example, coverage by the Associated Press has centered on how cats have been contaminated from pet food, ducks with bird flu at the New York Zoo, and how egg prices have affected Waffle House. This reporting neglects how bird flu is becoming an increasingly globalized and threatening disease.

“While there is much attention on the avian influenza situation in the US, this year, cases have also been reported from Australia, Canada, China, Cambodia, and Vietnam,” said Van Kerkhove, the acting director for epidemic and pandemic threat management at the World Health Organization.  

This pattern also extends beyond media organizations, as numerous public health and public policy experts have already begun decrying the global response to bird flu as inadequate and fractured between countries, denoting them as reminiscent of failures during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This trend is worrying given that the real looming threat is not that groceries will become more expensive—which is also a cause for concern but is not even solely induced by avian influenza—but instead that the disease could precipitate another global pandemic, and relevant actors are not focusing or preparing sufficiently for that possibility. 

“Even if there’s only a 5 percent chance of a bird flu pandemic happening, we’re talking about a pandemic that probably looks like 2020 or worse,” said Tom Peacock, a bird flu researcher at the Pirbright Institute, to PBS News.

Importantly, the potential for this outcome is real and growing. Not only are influenza A viruses (e.g., avian influenza) already the leading source of documented global pandemics, but the current wave of bird flu, particularly the H541 strain, has demonstrated an incredibly high evolution and mutation rate. The number of cases in a vast range of mammal species—including seals, cattle, sea lions, cats, dolphins, and polar bears—is already a testament to the risks and potential for mutation. 

Additionally, there is already precedent for the virus spreading rapidly between global regions and crossing borders. In 2021, the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza A virus (HPAI H5N1) crossed from Europe to North America and then from North America to South America in 2022. 

Specifically, due to the fact that the avian influenza is often transmitted by migratory birds, it has advantages compared to other diseases when it comes to its ability to proliferate globally. Independently, there is also concern that the virus could become airborne, enhancing its ability to spread.

Moreover, the number of cases of bird flu in humans around the world is growing, with there being approximately 100 cases across at least 3 continents in 2024. However, several studies have also suggested that there is a chance that many cases are going unreported.

All of these trends have also occurred while bird flu has yet to evolve to spread efficiently between humans, but the more human cases there are, the more likely this outcome becomes. If this shift does occur, it will be deadly; even a few mutations could allow the virus to rapidly proliferate from person to person, creating the potential for a broader pandemic. This concern is validated by the H7N9 strain of bird flu, which infected more than 1,500 people in China between 2013 and 2017. 

The likelihood of these mutations occurring is also growing, as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has already identified that the virus contains at least 34 characteristics that make human-to-human transmission an increasingly likely possibility. Additionally, each new case of mammalian infection also expands the pathways for human contagion because it expands the likelihood of humans coming into contact with it as well as multiplies the pathways for a mutation to occur.

“This feels the closest to an H5 pandemic that I’ve seen,” said Louise Moncla, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Even if bird flu does not become a full-blown human pandemic, which many experts agree is far from guaranteed, it still presents a significant, global problem. If left unchecked, the high spillover-rate between species means that the disease could vastly undermine global biodiversity, threatening ecosystem health. 

Hence, while bird flu is not at pandemic status yet, it is vital that the narrative be re-focused around the contingency that it could be. Media and medical professionals need to ensure that they are concentrated on the larger threat at hand—a potential pandemic—and not over-focused on the secondary, albeit still important, implications like egg prices.

This prescription also extends to government officials. By inadequately discussing the problem or centering the conversation around egg prices instead of ringing the alarm bells about the potential for another global pandemic, governments and institutions risk trading off resources and focus from solutions that can actually help thwart the disease itself. 

This problem is exemplified by the new Trump administration in the United States, which has centered its response to bird flu at the Department of Agriculture around lowering the cost of eggs, in lieu of focusing on preventing the possibility of a larger outbreak, inefficiently allocating resources and personnel and undermining the response effort. 

Now is not the time to politicize or turn-away from health institutions and pandemic-containing resources, but instead to reinvest in them, prioritizing countermeasures that could counteract the disease (e.g., vaccines, testing protocols, containment plans, and medicinal therapies) as well as global cooperation on public health issues, especially avian influenza.

Otherwise, the world could enter into a global tragedy that would have been both foreseeable and preventable.

“I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.

Jackson Hightower is a student at Georgetown University. The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author.