Dr. Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), said the avian influenza virus, also known as H5N1, has had an “extremely high” mortality rate among the several hundred people who They are known to have been infected with it. till the date.
Till the date, No human-to-human transmission of H5N1 has been recorded.
“H5M1 is (an) influenza infection, which started predominantly in poultry and ducks and has effectively spread over the course of the last one to two years to become a global animal zoonotic pandemic,” he said. “The big concern, of course, is that by doing so and infecting ducks and chickens, but now increasingly mammals, that virus will evolve and develop the ability to infect humans. And then, critically, the ability to move from person-to-person transmission.”
cattle mystery
Commenting on a current outbreak of the H5N1 virus among dairy cows in the United States, the senior WHO official urged public health authorities to conduct greater surveillance and investigation, “because it can evolve and be transmitted in different ways.”
Cows graze near a drilling platform in Texas, USA.
He added: “Do cow milking structures create aerosols? Is it the environment they live in? Is it the transportation system that is spreading this across the country? “This is a huge concern and I think we need to… make sure that if H5N1 reaches humans with human-to-human transmission, we are in a position to respond immediately with equitable access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.”
Same as the next pandemic
The development comes as the WHO announced updated language to describe airborne pathogens, in a bid to increase international cooperation in the event of a new (and expected) global pandemic.
The initiative originally arose from the COVID-19 emergency and the recognition that there was a lack of commonly agreed terms among doctors and scientists to describe how the coronavirus was transmitted, which increased the challenge of overcoming it, Dr. Farrar explained.
Global appeal
To counter this, the WHO led consultations with four major public health agencies from Africa, China, Europe and the United States, before announcing agreement on a series of new agreed terms. These include “infectious respiratory particles” or “IRPs,” which should be used instead of “aerosols” and “droplets,” to avoid any confusion about the size of the particles involved.
Beyond the new terminology, the initiative cements the international community's commitment to addressing “increasingly complex and frequent epidemics and pandemics,” Dr. Farrar told reporters in Geneva.
“It is an enormously important first step. But next, we must keep the disciplines and the experts together. We're using the same terminology, the same language, and now we need to do the science that provides evidence on tuberculosis, COVID, and other respiratory pathogens, so that we know how to control those infections better than we did in the past. past.”
On the possible public health risk of HN51, the WHO chief scientist warned that vaccine development was “not where we should be.” It is also not true that regional offices, national offices and public health authorities around the world have the capacity to diagnose H5N1, he noted.
