The US Has A Bird Flu Vaccine. This is why you can’t find one

Like avian flu As the virus infects poultry and dairy cattle in the United States, Georgia has become the latest state to detect the virus in commercial poultry, and on Friday, it halted all poultry sales. reduce the spread of the disease. Across the country, egg prices are rising—if you can find them in your local grocery store.

The ongoing spread of animals has also contributed about 67 people from bird fluall but one cause mild disease. Earlier this month, someone in Louisiana He died after being hospitalized with severe bird flu in December. This is the first recorded case of H5N1 in the country.

The US has already licensed three H5N1 vaccines for humans, but they are not commercially available. The government has purchased millions of doses to be stored across the country in case it is needed. But even as the outbreak spread, health officials under President Joe Biden didn’t hesitate to deploy them. Experts say the decision comes with risks, and for now, the risk of H5N1 remains low. Vaccinating farm workers and others at high risk of contracting the disease would be a straightforward approach, but even this would be premature. Now, with a change in federal health care leadership looming as President Donald Trump begins his second term, the decision has a new direction.

“Right now, given the severity and ease of the virus, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be necessary to get a vaccine to protect people,” says William Schaffner, a physician and professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. .

So far, no human-to-human transmission of H5N1 has been reported, but health officials are monitoring the virus for genetic changes that could make human transmission possible. Most cases of bird flu are related to contact with animals. Of the 67 known human cases in the US, 40 were linked to sick dairy cows and 23 were linked to poultry farms and expensive operations. In four other cases, the exact source is unknown.

In the U.S., human cases have been mild, with most cases involving conjunctivitis. Sometimes, people have mild respiratory symptoms. With the exception of the Louisiana patient, all of the people who tested positive for H5N1 recovered quickly and did not require hospitalization. In the past, H5N1 has killed about 50 percent of cases. Since 2003, 954 human cases of H5N1 reported to the World Health Organization, and about half of them died. Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and China have reported the highest number of deaths from bird flu.

Those numbers come with a few caveats. First, most of these deaths occurred in areas where people lived in close proximity to sick chickens. “In that case, they think they might be infected,” says Schaffner.

Also, the number of people who die from the disease – the number of infected people who die from the disease – only takes into account the well-known diseases, and some H5N1 infections are undoubtedly unknown because the symptoms of bird flu are similar to other respiratory viruses. In the US, language barriers among farm workers, lack of testing, and reluctance among workers to report illness are the main causes. “We probably miss more cases than we know, and we are more likely to know that there is a serious problem,” says Shira Doron, chief of disease control at Tufts Medicine in Boston and a clinical epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center.