Although he has decimated poultry herds and has become common among cattle, the flu influenza remains rare in humans, with just 70 confirmed cases at the national level. For the moment, the virus has not changed study From Scripps Research Institute, scientists found that he needed little additional transfer to make this jump.
Bringing together the third annual symposium of pandemic preparation for scripps Research last week, the researchers working in virology and chemistry have not taken the trouble to debate whether the H5N1 avian flu will erase this rapid obstacle or not. But some feared that current disorders in Washington, DC, would slow the ability of the Nation to react strictly when this microscopic threat inevitably gains the ability to cause a global pandemic, potentially causing more death than COVID-19.
This argued that virologist Angela Rasmussen, is not the time of friction in the flow of information between government agencies and the private sector, which will have to collaborate quickly to deploy medical stocks, isolate the new strain and start working on a updated vaccine.
“How are we going to know if H5N1 has acquired the possibility of being transmitted effectively?” How are we going to find this main group of human cases and be able to contain it before it spreads to the point that it did not contain? Said Rasmussen.
Senior researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, Rasmussen is known for his work often attacked on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic to a “wet” market in Wuhan, China. She was by far the most frank at the Jolla symposium, where her presentation included a slide that decreed “the destruction of American preparation”.
Projected on the screen of the massive auditorium of the event, the message of the size of a display panel referred to the recent actions of the government targeting public health, medicine and science, including a order January 21 for federal agencies, including American disease control and prevention centers, to suspend all external communications.
It also refer to the news that the government recently dismissed, then tried to re -engage workers in an American laboratory in the Department of Agriculture which, as an associated press, put He, “was part of an office that helps supervise the national laboratory network that the USDA relies to confirm the cases of flu birds and other animal diseases.” The presidential order To withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization, it was also mentioned, as is a recent freeze on federal subsidy funding.
Such actions, she said, increase the probability that H5N1 spreads from person to person to be identified in hospitals.
“I have nightmares that we will not know that a H5N1 pandemic started before seeing that a hospital system has filled with patients,” said Rasmussen. “It will be worse, I think, in terms of number of deaths and serious illnesses; This will also have an extremely impactful impact on the economic level due to the effect on species which are essential to our food supply. »»
This declaration obtained a college retreat from immunologist Alessandro Spette, co -director of the Center for Vaccine Innovation at the Jolla Institute for Immunology. He noted that there are important similarities between H5N1 and other types of flu virus, such as H1N1, which have long circulated in humans.
Previous meetings with similar viruses, he argued, are likely to transmit a certain level of protection for certain people. T cells, specialized white blood cells essential to overcome invading viruses, can persist in the body long after infection, which contributes to fighting infections similar to the future. This phenomenon seemed to occur in 2009 when elderly people often behaved better to fight H1N1, the new influenza strain that jumped to humans in pigs.
“The elderly did better … because they had been exposed to the H1N1 in circulation of 1957,” said Sette. “So, the preexisting immunity of the flu is a real thing in terms of illness.”
It is clear that he agrees with the global concerns of Rasmussen and that H5N1 is an important threat, he declared that his comments were intended to widen the discussion by noting that there could be significant reactive crossing immunity which could be useful “.
Rob Kirchdaerfer, virologist at the Institute of Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin, whose work has contributed to understanding the structure of the SRIS-COV-2 protein, has agreed that it is a particularly difficult moment.
He concluded with several who are concerned about the “restocking”, a phenomenon where two different viruses infecting the same cell can exchange genetic equipment, allowing changes that can help them make sudden jumps in adaptation to a new type of host.
“You have this virus, which, I would probably say, is still pre -evidence,” said Kirchdaerfer. “He jumps between species. He jumps into humans. He will come back in animal species (and) I do not think that we know what the H5N1 will look like the pandemic, and it is actually more frightening for me, because you have all these opportunities for evolution and drift and reassocation, and therefore I (find) which is absolutely terrifying. “”
Rasmussen has agreed that there remains a certain uncertainty as to the characteristics of the virus which will eventually acquire the ability to move from one person to another. Some subtypes appear in the first reports while others, such as a type presented at last week’s pandemic conference, are particularly fatal.
This recognition that there are several subtypes currently at stake, all active simultaneously, is a level of nuance that Rasmussen, which holds a doctorate in microbiology from the University of Columbia, said it was used to minimize the true severity of the H5N1 threat.
“My great fear is that these … disagreements and normal uncertainty that are inherent in the scientific process will be armed against the scientific community to prevent us from doing the work we have to do to respond to some of them,” said Rasmussen. “This will have enormous consequences in terms of the ability to respond and in terms of ability to really mitigate the potential loss of life.”
But that does not mean that no one did anything to prepare for the advent of an H5N1 pandemic. At the request of scientists, in particular those gathering in symposiums like that of Jolla, the federal government has spent millions by storing chemicals and other components necessary to quickly manufacture new vaccines and also on doses designed to correspond to the previous strains of H5N1.
A recent drafting According to the Congressional Research Service, says that there had already been 5 million doses of H5N1 vaccine produced, “with the expectation of 10 million doses at the beginning of 2025.” It is also estimated that certain antiviral drugs such as the Tamiflu, which can reduce the severity of the disease after infection, have at least a certain effect against the virus. The stock report indicates that the government has “68 million antiviral courses in hand”.
The deployment of these resources with as much dexterity as possible will be, according to experts, the difference in the lethality of a toy H5N1 pandemic.
Rasmussen said that the “envelope envelope” calculations that they have carried out with a colleague indicate that the influenza of pandemic birds could mean “7 to 10 million deaths” in the worst case, although the skilful use of stored resources can reduce this number. If it is correct, the toll would be much worse than what was the case for Covid-19, which killed or was the cause of the death contributing to 1.2 million Americans, according to to estimates of the CDC.
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