Dr. Richard Webby

Yeah, I'm not sure. I must admit, I don't do much catching a flu myself anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can see it.

I love it a lot, right? What is the risk? Yeah. So I'll tell you why I find that difficult to answer. If we look today, so right now today, even let's look at the virus that's in cows, even the viruses that we get from people that have been infected, they still have all the characteristics of bird viruses. They want to be infecting birds.

Which is good news, except... The problem is, this virus could be two, three, maybe even one mutation away from changing that. Yes.

So some people look at that, you know, even some experts look at that and say H5 can never become a human pathogen. Really?

That's right. That's just not able to do it, right?

That's right. It could. I mean, the argument against that, I'm not in that boat. I think the virus probably can, but the barrier to it making those key changes is relatively high.

So somewhere between sitting back with my feet up on the recliner and, as I tell people, running, you know, heading towards the hills. I'm in the middle. I think I'm square in the middle a little bit.

I think that'll be the key. If my neighbors see me arriving back from Sam's Club with four or five extra packets of toilet paper, then they will know I've changed.

The good answer is we don't know really, right? Because we've never had a pandemic in humans. Yeah, we've never had a pandemic to know how good they are in humans, which is a good thing.

When we say we are in emergency mode, that is the mode we are in right now. Could potentially lead to another pandemic.

That's right. Thanks, Blythe. How many citations are in this week's episode?

All right. And if people want to read more about bird flu, where should they go?

I didn't realize that when they started calling those coronavirus variants Delta and Omicron that they were being all fancy with us.

The day has come. Tell me this crazy stuff you're hearing about bird flu.

2022, 23.