If you think of bird flu as a stew, it appears that the latest batch has been simmering on low heat for a few years — at least for humans. Could it boil over into a pandemic?
Although there has been a slight uptick in human cases since the avian flu subtype named H5N1 appeared in North America about four years ago, science suggests that a full-fledged human pandemic is unlikely.
“There's no human-to-human transmission,” said Demetre Daskalakis, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official, at a join news conference with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the CDC. “We're nowhere close to calling this an endemic infection.”
At the time of the news conference in December 2024, there have been 61 reported cases in humans. Over 65,000 people have been tested nationally for multiple kinds of flu.
It is a serious issue in chickens and cows. But could it spread as quickly in humans? Although nothing is certain with viruses — they have a notorious ability to mutate and develop new strategies to enter and infect a host — there are several reasons why this isn’t likely.
