The avian flu has killed millions of chickens, decimated wild birds—and moved into mammals. Now the poultry industry needs new measures to stop its spread.
The H5N1 subtype first spilled from birds to humans in 1997 in Hong Kong. It sickened 18 people and killed six of them—small numbers, but a disturbing 33 percent mortality rate. Since then, variants of H5N1 have periodically infected people, causing 868 human cases through 2022 according to the World Health Organization, and 457 deaths.
Still, scientists are always watching for the virus to find situations that would encourage those adaptations. For instance: Spanish and Italian scientiststhat in October 2022, an H5N1 variant infected minks on a fur farm in northwest Spain. The virus might have been passed to a single mink by a wild bird, or via chicken carcasses used for feed. But once on the farm, it made minute adaptations that allowed it to spread from one mink to another.
That outbreak was unnerving, twice over. Not only had the virus begun adapting to mammals, but to a particular mammal that might have direct relevance for people. Minks belong to the same family as ferrets, which are already used by scientists for flu research because theyBut there’s a third reason why the mink outbreak was notable, something that is so normal in animal agriculture that it mostly goes unnoticed.
Operating in confinement doesn’t necessarily make a farm more vulnerable to infection, but once a virus penetrates the premises, confinement ensures that very many animals are exposed at once. That puts a lot of animals at risk—some of the egg farms wiped out by flu last year lost more than 5 million birds—and it also gives the virus a plethora of hosts to mutate in.
“When there’s public discussion of addressing zoonotic disease, it almost immediately turns to vaccination, preparedness, biosecurity—but no one discusses addressing the root cause,” says Jan Dutkiewicz, a political economist and visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Clinic. “We would never have a debate about preventing cancer from tobacco products without talking about stopping smoking.
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