How the U.S. Mishandled the Early Days of Bird Flu

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.3 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

H5N1 avian influenza has now reached almost 1,000 herds of dairy cattle in 16 states and has infected around 66 people, many of them agricultural workers, in the U.S. Host Rachel Feltman is joined by Amy Maxmen, a public health reporter at KFF Health News, to get the latest on bird flu. They explore how government and industry players lost control of the outbreak and what we can do to prevent a future pandemic of this evolving disease. Read the full story: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bird-flu-has-spread-out-of-control-after-mistakes-by-u-s-government-and/ Read more of Amy Maxmen’s work: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/author/amy-maxmen/ Sign up for Healthbeat’s newsletters here. E-mail us at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Fonda Mwangi with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
0:07.0	On January 6th, the Louisiana Department of Health reported the first human death from H5N1 in the United States.
0:14.0	While the CDC says that the general risk to human health is still considered low,
0:19.0	bird flu now looms large in headlines that identify it
0:22.6	as a potential future pandemic. Here to tell us more about where we stand and what we can do to
0:28.2	prevent the worst case scenario is Amy Maxman, a public health reporter at KFF Health News.
0:34.8	Amy, thanks so much for coming on to talk with us today. Thanks. It's my pleasure.
0:38.3	So let's start with a quick overview of the current bird flu outbreak. When and how did it
0:43.5	start? So around February of last year, farmers in the Texas panhandle started to notice that their
0:51.7	cows were acting abnormally like they weren't producing
0:55.4	as much milk. They had runny noses, things like that. And in about a couple of months,
1:00.5	researchers realized that the bird flu had actually spilled over into cattle for the first time
1:05.8	ever and was actually spreading between cattle. That's completely unprecedented. So that's how it began. And
1:13.0	since then, it's now in, you know, nearly a thousand herds in 16 states. And it's infected
1:20.4	around 66 people. Yeah. And how are things looking currently? Currently it's not good. I mean, in terms of this outbreak just sort of being across the U.S.
1:31.3	And a bit of disconcerting news is we had the first person die of the bird flu on January 6th.
1:37.2	That person was in Louisiana and they got the bird flu from a bird.
1:41.5	This wasn't like the exact variant that's been circulating in cattle, but it still is the H5N1 bird flu from a bird. This wasn't like the exact variant that's been circulating in cattle,
1:45.9	but it still is the H5N1 bird flu virus. And you recently wrote an article outlining how the U.S.
1:51.9	lost control of bird flu. Could you walk us through some of the major ways that this has been
1:57.1	mishandled so far? Yeah, you know, I think kind of one outstanding problem was the pace.
2:03.4	There's just been a really slow pace of response.
	...

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