After years later, the WHO asks to prepare for a new pandemic: they are concerned about H5N1, the bird flu virus. Not only has he jumped into countries where he’s never been before, but he’s it has also ceased to be a seasonal virus, and is permanently infecting.

They warn, above all, of outbreaks in mammals, which could mix and make the virus adapt to infect humans more easily. In a joint statement with the Food and Agriculture Agency of the UN (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health, they point out that some mammals “can serve as containers in which (different) influenza viruses can mix , leading to the emergence of new viruses that may be more harmful to animals and people.”

“The current outbreaks already are a risk to human health,” he explained to laSextaGraziella Almendral, scientific disseminator. And it is that when “you have thousands and thousands of infections in animals, animals as close to humans as pets, dogs and cats, we have an evolution of this virus that has gotten out of hand“.

For this reason, international organizations ask all countries to work together and be prepared by sharing all information about the virus on a single basis. Because understanding what evolution is and how it transforms can be key.

bird flu figures

Since 2003, WHO has been notified 868 cases of bird flu in humans and 457 deaths, in 21 countries. This year, animal outbreaks have already been reported in 14 countries.

The first lineage of the H5N1 avian influenza virus was identified in 1996 and has since caused several infectious outbreaks among birds. In 2020, a variant of the virus caused significant deaths among poultry and wild birds in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and then spread to North, Central, and South America.

A total of 67 countries on five continents reported cases in 2022, with 131 million domestic birds dead, either due to the disease or because they had to be slaughtered, which has affected numerous communities that depend on this economic activity.

This year, fourteen other countries reported outbreaks, mostly in the Americas.