An outbreak of bird flu has been tearing through the nation’s dairy farms and infecting more and more people.Now there are troubling signs that the United States may be closer to another pandemic, even as President Trump dismantles the country’s public health system.Apoorva Mandavilli, who covers science and global health for The Times, explains how the virus has changed and why our government might be ill-equipped to respond.Guest: Apoorva Mandavilli, a science and global health reporter at The New York Times.Background reading: Could the bird flu become airborne?Egg prices are high. They’re likely to go higher.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the current status of the bird flu outbreak in the U.S.?
From The New York Times, this is The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. Today, an outbreak of bird flu has been tearing through the nation's dairy farms and infecting more and more people. And now there are troubling signs that the United States might be closer to another pandemic, even as President Trump dismantles the country's public health system.
My colleague Apoorva Mandavilli explains how the virus has changed and why our government might be ill-equipped to respond. It's Thursday, February 13th. Apoorva, hello. Hello. So the last time we talked about bird flu on the show, which was last April, our colleague Emily Anthes was raising a modest amount of concern about the virus.
She said it had been spreading pretty quickly and intensely in birds, and also it had started to show up in other animals. But at that point, it was not that much of a concern for people, but it could be soon. So since then, we've been checking in with you periodically just to ask, should we be worried now? And you've told us at various points, no, not yet.
But this week, you told us yes, which was a little alarming. So what is going on?
So Emily covers animals. And when you talked to her, the virus was really mainly a threat to animals and to wild birds. It was in birds all over the country. But since then, you know, it really started infecting a lot of different kinds of animals, actually, in a way that I've heard experts say they've never seen a virus do before. And then it also became quite clear that it is capable of
jumping into people and causing problems in people. In fact, at the time when you talked to Emily, there were probably only a couple of cases. Well, now we have 68. And we'll get to those 68 in a minute.
But first, can we just understand bird flu a little bit better and why it's infecting all these different animals in addition to people?
Yeah, so H5N1 is a bird flu virus, meaning it is really best adapted to infect birds. And usually, you know, you might expect to see it occasionally in a different kind of animal, just if an animal was in very close contact with an infected bird. But what we've been seeing now is that there are all kinds of animals, including mammals, that seem to be really susceptible to this virus.
The range of animal species, we've gone from cats and deer and bears and sea mammals and raccoons and all of these animal species. And we've not really seen a virus gain that many new host species in such a short time. That's been really alarming to watch.
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Chapter 2: Why is the bird flu now a concern for humans?
They get these very severe neurological symptoms, and a lot of them end up dying.
That's really horrible to think about. I'm sure there's a lot of cat owners out there that are really grimacing right now. But are people wondering, can an infected cat give it to a human? You mentioned earlier that 68 people have been infected. What do we know about how they got infected?
In most of the cases, they got infected by either being really close to and interacting with an infected animal, like a dairy cattle in most of those cases, or poultry. There were three cases where they don't know how the person got infected. And so that's a bit of a mystery.
Is there anything about these cases that indicates that it's gotten more contagious or more likely to spread between people?
So far, we haven't really seen that. There was one set of people who lived in the same household in Missouri who there was some question that maybe they gave it to each other. But overall, we have not seen any signs that the virus is now jumping between people or knows how to do that. However, I will say there is a new version of the virus that's now circulating.
And it was just seen in the cattle in Nevada. And what they discovered is that it seems to already have a mutation that makes it easier for the virus to infect people. And the thing about that particular version of the virus is that we know of at least two people who've become infected with it who got very, very sick. So there was one person in America who died of H5N1, this patient in Louisiana.
And then there was a 13-year-old teenager from Canada who both got infected with that version of the virus, and they were both sick for many weeks, and the Louisiana patient died. But the really worrisome part about that was that in both of those people, the virus continued to mutate while it was in the person and acquired some mutations that would make it easier for it to spread between people.
Fortunately, it did not do that. It didn't jump from them to anybody else. But it showed us that the virus is capable of doing that. And in both of these patients, the Canadian teenager and the Louisiana patient, one of the mutations was the same. Usually when you see that, it means that that mutation gives the virus some kind of advantage that it likes, that it's going to hang on to.
And so it's just a sign that the virus is good at getting to the place where it can become better at infecting people.
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Chapter 3: How is the bird flu affecting various animal species?
We don't. I mean, we have some clues just based on what it's been doing as we've been talking about. But one thing that's really clear is that for it to become a pandemic virus, it has to change. And when it changes, we don't know what other ways it's going to change in and whether it'll have to give up some qualities like contagiousness.
Will it become much milder in its quest to become more contagious? We don't know what trade-offs the virus is going to end up having to make.
So, Purva, everything that you're saying is, I got to be honest, making me kind of nervous. It just sounds like there's so much we don't know about the virus. Plus, we're not testing. Plus, the virus is changing in unpredictable ways.
And that, combined with the fact that we're not sure whether what we're hearing from the CDC is reliable or if we're getting enough information, all of that is a bad combination, right?
Yeah, I mean, we do know that over the past year, you know, as little as was going on with things like testing, when there was big news, we did hear from the CDC. You know, they would hold these joint press conferences along with the USDA and the FDA, and they would talk through something like the Nevada case. And they did give out some public health messages.
Like they did say, you know, don't drink raw milk, things like that. They may not have said it loudly or often enough, but they did say it. And I was just getting to a point with them in December where they were starting to say, More things like this is a low risk situation right now, but it could change very quickly. But now they've gone silent.
And I don't think it's because there's nothing to say, because clearly there is. It just seems like we have not really any good visibility on what they're doing or not doing and how much information they are allowed to to give us. So it sort of is going to be incumbent upon us as citizens to be very careful.
Okay, so just to sum everything up, you've described a lot of worrying signs, but we have not yet seen a lot of evidence of human-to-human transmission or that that's coming anytime soon. The more alarming thing is that what you have described is how unprepared we are to tackle bird flu in this very moment.
And I have to say, I think a lot of people listening to this are going to be sort of astounded by that, considering that we're coming up on the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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