save countless lives. Vaccinate the bird. – Rolling Stone

COVID. monkeypox. of Old flu.we live in a new era Overlapping virus outbreaksBut as terrifying as these ailments may be, at least there are safe, effective, and readily available ailments. vaccination Even if the first COVID vaccine took a year of desperate work.

have at least one viral illness please do not However, there are broadly effective vaccines. bird-flu‘Highly pathogenic avian influenza’ or HPAI in scientific terms.

And that worries epidemiologists. “The chances of an HPAI strain being the next pandemic are small, but not zero,” said Tony Moody, professor of immunology at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. rolling stone.

Bird flu viruses are common—well, guess what. goose. duck. And perhaps the most troublesome are chickens. Of these, there are tens of billions around the world.

Bird flu is all around us. Spread from bird to bird. mutation. Evolve. And sometimes “leap from bird to man”ZoonosisIf zoonotic diseases surge and many people become infected with bird flu, a new pandemic could occur. Refusal to prepay for vaccines may prevent rapid containment.

Scientists first identified bird flu in 1959 in Scottish geese. Over the next four decades, the virus evolved into his now circulating forms of HPAI, H5 and H7.

In 1999, the virus first infected humans in Hong Kong. In 2003, another minor outbreak occurred. Symptoms included fever and cough. The worst result was respiratory failure. Altogether about 400 people died.

These outbreaks were an ominous omen. It shows that a wider human outbreak, in fact a pandemic, could occur. whenNo If.

After the 2003 outbreak, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Food and Drug Administration worked with the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur to develop a human vaccine for HPAI. In 2007, the federal government purchased his eight million doses of Sanofi’s jab and stored it in a US Department of Defense warehouse. health and Strategic National Stockpile of Human Services.

However, the dosage eventually expired.and not today Any Bird Flu Vaccine in U.S. Stockpile, Strategic National Stockpile Officer Said rolling stoneThe problem isn’t just that dosages expire after a few years. A bigger problem is that the HPAI virus and other highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses are constantly mutating. Just like human flu.

James Lawler, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said, “Specialists advocate mass stockpiling of vaccines for every foreseeable combination, or at least the ones we’ve seen. I have a lot of houses,” he said. rolling stoneBut it’s probably pointless to keep a ton of jabs hidden against the old form of the virus.

Stockpiling an avian flu vaccine that is effective against current strains of the virus, and stockpiling amounts that would actually matter in the event of a large-scale human outbreak, would require a “huge investment,” Lawler said. rice field.

how big is it? Scientists identifying the latest strains, industry developing new vaccines, and governments paying for millions of doses can cost billions of dollars annually. “It’s a never-ending cycle that follows the evolution of viruses,” Moody said.

I have no appetite for it. Consider the sharp decline in federal investment in COVID vaccines. Faced with fierce opposition in Congress from anti-vaccine Republicans, this summer President Joe Biden’s administration nearly gave up on passing a new COVID appropriation bill, instead suggesting an imminent “commercialization” of the pandemic. did.

The federal government will stop paying for COVID vaccines around the end of the year. And Big Pharma will start charging individuals over $100 for his one injection.When governments are not even willing to invest in mitigation Current Don’t expect to spend a lot to prevent a possible pandemic future 1.

There is another way. Vaccinate birds, not people. Theoretically, inoculating enough domestic geese, chickens and ducks (the birds people are most likely to come into close contact with) could stave off zoonotic diseases. That is, to suppress the virus so that it does not jump into the human population.

The main problem is the same. Bird flu viruses mutate so quickly that they’re hard to keep up with. But at least the incentives are different.

human Outbreaks of bird flu are regular and so far small. When we make human vaccines for bird flu, we tend not to use them and they end up going bad. felt like them.

By contrast, outbreaks in birds occur all the time. In 2014 and 2015, outbreaks in the United States forced authorities to cull tens of millions of birds worth billions of dollars. Another serious outbreak of birds This year started in South Carolina.When producing bird vaccines, actually use they.

The trick is to develop a bird vaccine that works for a long time even if the virus mutates. Adel Talaat, a professor of pathobiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is developing a so-called “nanovaccine” that blends small particles from several different avian flu strains.

Talaat’s theory is that this mixture of genetic material induces broad immunity against current and future strains of HPAI.tarato said rolling stone He hopes to have efficacy data by the end of the year, which could result in a license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to administer the vaccine to domestic flocks.

It’s a start. However, there are tens of billions of domesticated birds in the world, all of which can transmit avian influenza to other birds and people.vaccination A few Those are viable.vaccination all Impossible of them.

Given current politics, the best we can hope to do is partially vaccinate some of our livestock. Talaat said a vaccine like the one he is developing is “the only practical hope.” Hopefully, they’ll be enough to prevent a human bird flu pandemic for a few more years.

Bird flu is a unique problem. A large-scale human outbreak could infect billions and kill millions. And everyone knows how to prevent it. A stockpile of excellent vaccines that is permanently renewed every year.

But this approach is so costly that we seem content to save money…and seize the chance. It’s not hard to imagine the day when we wield it.