“We risk a pandemic” –

The level of attention on avian influenza has been raised and cases of dairy cows infected by the virus have raised the alarm. In March 2024, some farmers noticed that their animals were starting to behave unusually and reported it. A few weeks later, on April 30, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed “the presence of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus” in 34 dairy herds in 9 American states. The announcement had immediate effects, especially because the virus has proven capable of spreading from one farm to another. “If many dairy farm workers contract H5N1”, the avian virus circulating among cows in several US states, “we risk a pandemic”. Jennifer B. Nuzzo, Lauren Sauer and Nahid Bhadelia, three American academics, clearly state this in an article published in the ‘Washington Post’. The measures “rightly adopted” by the Department of Agriculture to prevent avian influenza from spreading among cattle herds in other states of the country, warn the three experts, “will do little against the main threat that H5N1 represents for man: the infection of workers” of the affected companies.

«Our inability to protect them», they warn, not only «puts their health at risk», but «gives the virus the opportunity to evolve into» a pathogen that would constitute «a greater risk for people, including those who live far away from farms.” Nuzzo is a professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health; Sauer is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center where he directs the Special Pathogen Research Network, while Bhadelia, an infectious disease specialist, is an associate professor, director and founder of the Center on Emerging Infections at Boston University. In the article they recall that to date only one case of cow-human contagion is known in the context of the ongoing epidemic among US cattle (the Texas worker who reported haemorrhagic conjunctivitis), but they cite the statements released by the veterinarian Barb Peterson to the trade publication ‘Bovine Veterinarian’.

“Every company I’ve worked with except one had sick people at the same time they had sick cows. There has been an underreporting of the virus »among humans, she said. Other reports say the same thing, underline the signatories of the intervention on the WP, and «these reports are worrying not because the infections are serious – they specify – but because any increase in human infections increases the possibility that the virus reaches someone who suffers from other diseases and that, if infected, could suffer worse consequences. And historically – they recall – H5N1 has not been mild in men: out of almost 900 people who, as far as we know, have been infected so far in the world, the virus has killed around half of them”.