{"id":6272,"date":"2024-04-05T07:28:36","date_gmt":"2024-04-05T12:28:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=6272"},"modified":"2024-04-05T07:28:40","modified_gmt":"2024-04-05T12:28:40","slug":"why-a-leading-bird-flu-expert-isnt-convinced-that-the-risk-h5n1-poses-to-people-has-declined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2024\/04\/05\/why-a-leading-bird-flu-expert-isnt-convinced-that-the-risk-h5n1-poses-to-people-has-declined\/","title":{"rendered":"Why a leading bird flu expert isn\u2019t convinced that the risk H5N1 poses to people has declined"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2024\/04\/05\/bird-flu-ron-fouchier-h5n1-risk-to-people\/\">STAT<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>News that H5N1 avian influenza has breached another mammalian species \u2014 this time dairy cows \u2014 has taken the flu science community aback. Though cows previously had been seen to be susceptible to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1999-4915\/11\/6\/561\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">human flu viruses<\/a>, and could be\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC2600352\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">experimentally infected<\/a>\u00a0with H5 in a lab, the absence of cow involvement until now in H5\u2019s nearly 30-year history lulled scientists into thinking the species was outside the virus\u2019s remit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Further elevating the concern this discovery has triggered is the fact that a dairy farm worker in Texas was infected with H5N1, though the unnamed individual\u2019s only symptom was conjunctivitis. To put these developments in perspective, STAT turned to Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, a leading expert on H5N1, for his assessment of these latest twists in the H5 saga. Fouchier, who studies avian influenza at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, was at the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/content\/article\/flu-researcher-ron-fouchier-its-pity-it-has-come\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">center of a controversy<\/a>\u00a0about H5N1 in 2012, when a U.S. scientific advisory group moved to restrict publication of research he and a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had done \u2014 separately \u2014 to see what mutations would be needed for the virus to be able to spread efficiently among people, so-called gain of function research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2024\/04\/05\/bird-flu-ron-fouchier-h5n1-risk-to-people\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>STAT News that H5N1 avian influenza has breached another mammalian species \u2014 this time dairy cows \u2014 has taken the flu science community aback. Though cows previously had been seen to be susceptible to\u00a0human flu viruses, and could be\u00a0experimentally infected\u00a0with H5 in a lab, the absence of cow involvement until now in H5\u2019s nearly 30-year [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[37,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-avian-influenza","category-featured-headlines"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6272","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=6272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6273,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6272\/revisions\/6273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}