You know how COVID-19 started spreading quietly in 2019, but no one knew it yet? Well, bird flu is doing the exact opposite. It’s giving us countless warning signs that we could be in the early days of a growing crisis, and yet we are still acting blissfully unaware. Since 2022, a bird flu pandemic has caused the deaths of over 100 million birds in the U.S. poultry industry and almost half a billion farmed birds around the world.

For years, agribusiness and government officials have dismissed the risk posed by factory farms, but the disease’s novel jump to cattle and its spread from mammal to mammal makes the danger of this mutating pathogen harder to downplay. Scientists worry that we are falling behind an emerging pandemic by failing to track the virus and understand the full scope of infection among farm workers. We are now locked in a biological arms race with a zoonotic pathogen that has had a 50 percent mortality rate in humans, and we’re losing ground.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that the U.S. population has “extremely low to no” immunity to H5N1 bird flu. It plans to spend $5 million on seasonal flu vaccinations for farm workers vulnerable to infection. Meanwhile, “extreme heat” and fans used on factory farms are believed to be exacerbating bird flu’s spread.

The highly pathogenic avian influenza virus has now been confirmed on 172 dairy farms in 13 U.S. states, and H5N1 has infected at least 13 people in the U.S. since April — four of those cases tied to exposure to infected dairy cows. This rapid spread through the dairy industry indicates that the virus is changing.

© The Hill