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H5N1 Has Been Found in Nine Mammalian Species. Be Frightened.
Skunks, raccoons, red foxes, and bobcats. Grizzly bears, black bears, tigers, and mountain lions. These are the species where H5N1 avian influenza has already been detected. And as I write this, another article has just been published about four dead seals in Scotland that tested positive for H5N1.
Now think back to all the human-to-animal transmissions of COVID. To viruses, we’re all just different flavors of hosts.
Should we panic? Of course not. But we need to pay very close attention to what’s happening with H5N1, which is highly pathenogenic (meaning that it doesn’t take a high viral load to cause the disease) and has a mortality rate of 53%, thirteen times worse than COVID.
Before today, I wasn’t worried overmuch about H5N1. I didn’t worry about the 2014 outbreak of Ebola, overreacted during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, and was spot-on concerning COVID in early February of 2020. There is not yet any guarantee that we are facing a potentially much-worse pandemic with H5N1. But the key word there is ‘yet’.
There is still hope to be had from our experience with Ebola. As deadly as it is, the reason why Ebola never became a pandemic was due to its low degree of virulence, meaning that the virus didn’t spread so easily from person to person. H5N1, as terribly virulent…
