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A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that was supposed to be made public weeks ago, but was withheld because President Donald Trump halted all external communications by federal health agencies, warns bird flu may be spreading in humans. Two other studies on the current bird flu situation in the United States are reportedly still awaiting release.
The concern is that highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1, AKA bird flu, is unknowingly being contracted by veterinarians who work with cattle.
According to the delayed CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, “Public health officials conducted a serosurvey among 150 bovine veterinary practitioners. Three practitioners had evidence of recent infection with HPAI A(H5) virus, including two without exposures to animals with known or suspected HPAI A(H5) virus infections and one who did not practice in a U.S. state with known HPAI A(H5) virus–infected cattle.”
While, at least at the time the study was completed, none of the veterinarians have experienced any flu-like symptoms and there has been no human-to-human spread detected, a study published in December revealed that human-to-human spread of bird flu may only be a few genetic mutations away. This is a problem because the H5N1 bird flu virus has a fatality rate of 50 percent in humans.
“The findings demonstrate how easily this virus could evolve to recognize human-type receptors,” said first author of the new study, infectious disease scientist Ting-Hui Lin.
Earlier this month, a new strain of bird flu was confirmed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in milk samples collected from dairy cows in Nevada. Prior to that, another new strain of bird flu, which has never been seen in the United States before, was discovered on a duck farm in California.
“If the circulating H5 viruses become more transmissible between humans, we are not going to be able to control transmission as the viruses will spread rapidly and often subclinically,” an infectious disease epidemiologist with the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Gregory Gray, told NPR.
In 2020, Dr. Michael Gregor wrote a book in which he warned that bird flu hitting the chicken farming industry could take out half of the world’s population. Then, in 2024, former director of the CDC, virologist Dr. Robert Redfield, warned that it is “not a question of if, it’s more a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic.”
“CDC right now is not reporting influenza data through the WHO global platforms, FluNet [and] FluID, that they’ve been providing information [on] for many, many years,” WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove warned in a press briefing last week. “We are communicating with them, but we haven’t heard anything back.”