American Scientific Bird flu was nearly everywhere in the U.S.—in chickens, cows, pet cats and even humans. Cases have gone down, but experts warn that it hasn’t disappeared. For months, bird flu was seemingly everywhere in the U.S.: news headlines reported the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus was rapidly sweeping through hundreds of herds of dairy cattle and leading to massive culls of poultry flocks, concerning infections in humans and grocery store aisles where nary an egg could be found.
But nearly as quickly as bird flu took hold in daily conversations, it disappeared from them and most people’s thoughts—making it easy for the public to think avian influenza’s threat had waned. Far from it, experts say. “The flu is still there, and we just don’t know enough about it,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.
What made the virus apparently fade away—and what does that mean for the future of bird flu?