Bird Flu Leaves the World With an Existential Choice
After three bleak years, the coronavirus pandemic is finally drawing to a close, but pandemics as a general threat very much are not. At the moment, the most pressing concern is H5N1, better known as bird flu. Public-health experts have worried for decades about the virus’s potential to spark a pandemic, and the current strain has been devastating global bird populations—not to mention spilling over into assorted mammalian hosts—for more than a year. But those worries became even more urgent in mid-October, when an outbreak of the virus on a Spanish mink farm seemed to show that the mink were not only contracting the disease but transmitting it.
Occasional spillover from birds to mammals is one thing; transmission among mammals—especially those whose respiratory tracts resemble humans’ as closely as mink’s do—is another. “I’m actually quite concerned about it,” Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, told me. “The situation we’re in with H5 now, we have not been in before, in terms of how widespread it is, in terms of the different hosts it’s infecting.”
What’s hard to gauge at, but that could change as the virus continues to spread and mutate.And the kind of research that some scientists say could allow us to get a handle on the danger is, to put it mildly, fraught. Those scientists think it’s essential to protect us from future pandemics. Others think it risks nothing less than the complete annihilation of humanity. Which way you feel—and how you think the world should approach pandemic preparedness as a whole—comes down to which type of pandemic you think we should be worried about.
