CBS/AP – Health officials are making a renewed call for vigilance against bird flu, but some experts are puzzling over why reports of new human cases have stopped appearing.
- Has the search for cases been weakened by government cuts?
- Are immigrant farm workers, who have accounted for many of the U.S. cases, more afraid to come forward for testing amid the Trump administration’s deportation push?
- Is it just a natural ebb in infections?
“We just don’t know why there haven’t been cases,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University.
“I think we should assume there are infections that are occurring in farmworkers that just aren’t being detected.”
The H5N1 bird flu has been spreading widely among wild birds, poultry and other animals around the world for several years, and starting early last year became a problem in people and cows in the U.S.
In the last 14 months, infections have been reported in 70 people in the U.S. — most of them workers on dairy and poultry farms, and mostly with mild symptoms. One person died in Louisiana.
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While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the virus still poses a low risk to the general public, an infectious disease expert noted that every new infection increases the odds that bird flu could mutate and lead to more severe disease.
“We are really at risk of this virus evolving into one that has pandemic potential,” Dr. Kamran Khan recently told “60 Minutes.” “And the reality is none of us know whether this is next week, or next year, or never. I don’t think it’s never. But it may be here far sooner than any of us would like.”
California had been a hotspot, with three-quarters of the nation’s infections in dairy cattle. But testing and cases among people have fallen off …