Examine, a free weekly newsletter covering science with a sceptical, evidence-based eye, is sent every Tuesday. You’re reading an excerpt – sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.
In Spain, bird flu appears to have spread from mink to mink for the first time. This is a troubling situation that warrants close attention.
“These are exactly the kind of situations we’re really worried about,” Associate Professor Paul Horwood tells me. Dr Michelle Wille says she and “many of my colleagues globally are very concerned”.
In today’s Examine: what’s happened, and why it matters.
Health workers in protective suits begin culling of ducks after the H5N8 strain of bird flu was detected among domestic birds in Alappuzha, India, in 2021. Credit:AP
Virus risk is a numbers game. Human viruses tend to come from animals. Animals have been around for a lot longer than humans, so they have many more viruses than we do. The closer we get to animals – by farming and land-clearing – the more we risk a new virus jumping into humans and causing a pandemic.
There are 27 known influenza subtypes; only three circulate in humans. Most of the others circulate in waterfowl. Since the discovery of this particular lineage of H5N1 in 1996, scientists have focused on it as one of the viruses that could plausibly cause a pandemic – for two reasons.
First, H5N1 is endemic in poultry in several countries, including Bangladesh, China and Indonesia. Second, it is extremely lethal in humans.
Influenza viruses bind to certain sialic acid-containing receptors on the surface of cells, using them to get inside and take over. These receptors come in multiple varieties; human influenza viruses bind to alpha-2,6 receptors, while the viruses that infect birds prefer alpha-2,3.
Bird flu is spreading among mammals. How worried should we be?
Examine, a free weekly newsletter covering science with a sceptical, evidence-based eye, is sent every Tuesday. You’re reading an excerpt – sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.
In Spain, bird flu appears to have spread from mink to mink for the first time. This is a troubling situation that warrants close attention.
“These are exactly the kind of situations we’re really worried about,” Associate Professor........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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