WHO expresses “great concern” that bird flu will begin to spread from person to person

MADRID, (EUROPA PRESS). – The leading scientific doctor of the World Health Organization, Dr. Jeremy Farrar, warns of “the great concern” that bird flu could evolve and begin to spread from person to person.

H5N1 is an influenza infection, which predominantly started in poultry and ducks. To date, no human-to-human transmission of H5N1 has been recorded. The virus has had an “extremely high” mortality rate among the several hundred people known to have been infected by it to date.

In relation to an outbreak of the H5N1 virus among dairy cows in the United States, the head of the WHO has urged public health authorities to continue monitoring closely and investigating, “because it can evolve and be transmitted in different ways.”

“Do cow milking structures create aerosols? Is it the environment they live in? Is it the transportation system that is spreading it across the country? This is a big concern and I think we need to make sure we that if the H5N1 virus spreads from person to person, we are in a position to respond immediately with equitable access to vaccines, treatments and diagnostics,” he said.

The news comes as the WHO announced updating language to describe airborne pathogens, in a bid to increase international cooperation in the event of a new and expected pandemic.

As Dr. Farrar explains, the initiative arose as a result of the emergency caused by Covid-19 and the recognition that there was a lack of commonly agreed terms between doctors and scientists to describe how the coronavirus was transmitted, which increased the challenge of overcoming it.

To counter this, the WHO led consultations with four major public health bodies in Africa, China, Europe and the United States, before announcing agreement on a series of new consensus terms. These include “infectious respiratory particles” or “IRPs”, which should be used instead of “aerosols” and “droplets”, to avoid any confusion about the size of the particles in question.

Beyond the new terminology, the initiative consolidates the international community’s commitment to confront “increasingly complex and frequent epidemics and pandemics,” Dr. Farrar told reporters in Geneva.

“It is a very important first step. But the next thing is to keep the disciplines and experts together, [porque] “We are using the same terminology, the same language, and now we have to do the science that provides the tests on tuberculosis, Covid and other respiratory pathogens, so that we know how to control those infections better than we have in the past.” , he pointed out.

Regarding the possible public health risk of HN51, the WHO chief scientist warned that vaccine development is not “where it needs to be.” “Nor do regional and national offices and public health authorities around the world have the capacity to diagnose H5N1,” he noted.