{"id":2362,"date":"2023-01-31T17:08:29","date_gmt":"2023-01-31T23:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=2362"},"modified":"2023-01-31T17:08:31","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T23:08:31","slug":"incredibly-concerning-bird-flu-outbreak-at-spanish-mink-farm-triggers-pandemic-fears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/01\/31\/incredibly-concerning-bird-flu-outbreak-at-spanish-mink-farm-triggers-pandemic-fears\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Incredibly concerning\u2019: Bird flu outbreak at Spanish mink farm triggers pandemic fears"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p>(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/content\/article\/incredibly-concerning-bird-flu-outbreak-spanish-mink-farm-triggers-pandemic-fears\">Science<\/a>) Spread among captive mink could give the H5N1 strain opportunities to evolve and adapt to mammals.  When mink at a big farm in Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain, started to die in October 2022, veterinarians initially thought the culprit might be SARS-CoV-2, which has struck mink farms in several other countries. But lab tests soon revealed something scarier: a deadly avian influenza virus named H5N1. Authorities immediately placed workers on the farm under quarantine restrictions. The more than 50,000 mink at the facility were killed and their carcasses destroyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>None of the farm workers became infected. But the episode, described in a paper in&nbsp;Eurosurveillance&nbsp;last week, has&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurosurveillance.org\/content\/10.2807\/1560-7917.ES.2023.28.3.2300001\">reignited long-smoldering fears that H5N1 could trigger a human pandemic<\/a>. The virus is not known to spread well between mammals; people almost always catch it from infected birds, not one another. But now, H5N1 appears to have spread through a densely packed mammalian population and gained at least one mutation that favors mammal-to-mammal spread. Virologists warn that H5N1, now rampaging through birds around the world, could invade other mink farms and become still more transmissible.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Science) Spread among captive mink could give the H5N1 strain opportunities to evolve and adapt to mammals. When mink at a big farm in Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain, started to die in October 2022, veterinarians initially thought the culprit might be SARS-CoV-2, which has struck mink farms in several other countries. But lab [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":2363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[37,21,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-avian-influenza","category-featured","category-zoonotic-diseases"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screenshot-2023-01-31-at-18.07.05.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2362"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2364,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2362\/revisions\/2364"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}