A UK expert has said that work should start on making a vaccine against bird flu in case the virus starts to spread between people.
Professor Ian Brown, who is the head of virology at the Animal and Plant Health Agency, said that the virus was changing quickly and was spreading from birds to mammals more and more. This made humans a bigger threat.
“Any spillover event [to other species] on the scale we are seeing raises the risk,” he said.
“We know from COVID that getting vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines ready for a pandemic takes time.
“We aren’t ready to vaccinate people against H5 yet.
“We should get started.”
His call to action echoed a warning from the World Health Organization against getting too comfortable (WHO).
WHO’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Thursday that even though the risk to humans is low right now, “we cannot assume that will stay the case, and we must be ready for any change in the status quo.”
Until recently, the H5N1 virus mostly affected chickens and birds that moved around, including birds in the UK.
But in the last two years, it has spread to many wild bird populations and started to infect mammals, such as farmed mink in Spain, wild sealions in Peru, and sometimes foxes and otters in the UK.
Professor Martin Beer, head of the Institute for Diagnostic Virology at the Friedrich Loeffler Institute in Germany, said, “The virus changes faster than we can describe it.”
In the last 20 years, H5N1 has infected 868 people and killed 457 of them, according to the WHO. So far, there has been no proof of a person-to-person transmission.
Prof. Brown said that work on vaccines should start now, but they couldn’t be finished until it was known which strain of the virus was spreading in people.
