Reserved for subscribers
By its unprecedented scale, the H5N1 virus which is spreading on the planet raises fears of an adaptation of the virus to humans, and therefore a new pandemic.
Par Olivier Hertel
© ERNESTO BENAVIDES / AFP
Published on
Subscriber-only audio playback
« C’is on an unprecedented scale. New foci appear almost every day. What is new is this global circulation of the virus. Now all continents are affected, ”warns Sylvie van der Werf, professor at Paris-Cité University and virologist at the Institut Pasteur. This invader which worries the health authorities, in France and in the rest of the world, is none other than H5N1, an avian influenza virus.
Since October 2021, he has been responsible for “the epizootic – epidemic in animals – of highly pathogenic avian influenza, the most devastating that Europe has ever known”, warns Public Health France. If several waves have affected poultry farms since 2015, the one that started in the fall of 2021 stands out: “It does not…