The bird flu alert

Analysis: The risk is that H5N1 will be our next pandemic 

The fact that the bird flu virus H5N1 has spread widely among dairy cows in the United States is a cause for concern, writes Zeynep Tufekci in an analysis in the New York Times.

Tufekci writes that it is clear that US authorities do not have the outbreak under control. The testing of cows comes too late, is too poorly coordinated and is done on too small a scale. Basically no humans have been tested yet. A registered case of human infection has been registered.

- There is a small margin between one infected and ten infected people. By the time ten are infected, it's probably already too late, says Rick Bright, an expert on H5N1, in her article.

The big fear is that the virus will mutate and start spreading between people.

"It is very possible that we are lucky with H5N1 and that it never begins to spread from human to human [...] but a large outbreak among animals raises the risk," writes Tufekci.

Epidemiologist Martha Nelson tells Nature that fast data is the key in a large outbreak.

- The ten thousand kroner question for me is whether we are too late now, she says.

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Worry in the US: Bird flu has spread among cows

A new variant of the bird flu virus H5N1 has spread widely among dairy cows in the United States. The variant has been detected on farms in at least eight states, but the infection is likely to be much more widespread than that.

The US food agency FDA has done tests of milk in grocery stores that show that 20 percent carried traces of the virus. Stat News spoke with an epidemiologist in Ohio who did his own testing of milk from ten different states. The virus was found in over a third.

American authorities state that the pasteurization makes the milk safe to drink anyway. There is no evidence that the virus particles found in the milk are contagious.

According to Politico, there is only one recorded case of the new variant infecting a human, but there is no evidence that the variant is transmitted from human to human