Health
How The Times is reporting on the bird flu outbreak
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Many of the scientists Apoorva Mandavili spoke to seemed convinced of the same thing: A bird flu virus called H5N1 could spark the world's next pandemic.
That was in 2002. H5N1, which first emerged in 1996, did not spread as quickly as once feared, but it never went away. Since 2003, H5N1 has infected about 900 people worldwide, about half of whom died from the disease.
Mandavili, a science and global health reporter for The New York Times, began covering bird flu two decades ago and has since reported on numerous infectious diseases, including COVID-19 and MPOX, formerly known as monkeypox, as well as epidemics such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.
Recently, she has turned her attention back to the H5N1 virus, which is rapidly adapting to new hosts by jumping from birds to a variety of mammals, including dairy cows, and which public health officials say infected three U.S. farmworkers this spring, mostly those who worked with dairy cows. Mild symptoms.
In an interview, Mandavili spoke about how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we cover viruses, including H5N1, and what we need to know about the current avian flu outbreak. This interview has been edited and condensed.
How does H5N1 compare to other viruses and infectious diseases you've covered?
This one's been a bit of a slow process, and we don't know where it's going yet. With COVID, we've been thrown into the middle of a major crisis. Problems like measles and HIV are ongoing. And H5N1 has been around for a long time. I started reporting on this virus in 2002. It was kind of a distant threat, a “maybe it'll happen.”
This particular lineage, or family of viruses, started in 2020. This virus killed a variety of birds and poultry. It has since been identified in all sorts of mammals, including foxes, raccoons, bears, rats, goats, sea lions, and minks. It's not something that should cause anyone to panic, but knowing the threat this virus can pose, it's not something that can be ignored either.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic and reporting on it changed your approach to reporting? virus?
COVID affected everything. If you asked me before COVID if the world was prepared for a pandemic, I would have answered, “Parts of the world are ready, and parts are not.” And the areas that were ready would have included the US and the UK. Then we saw what happened. Now we are aware of all our blind spots and everything that could go wrong. When an outbreak occurs, and this happened with MPOX, you immediately narrow your focus to “what are they doing about this?”
Can you elaborate on some of them?
One is vaccine development. Will the vaccine be ready? Of course, we don't have it yet for corona, but we do for mpox. But there have been a lot of manufacturing issues with the vaccine. There's been confusion at every level. The other is interagency communication. The current dairy epidemic requires three agencies to work together: USDA, CDC, and FDA are all involved. And as with any zoonotic disease epidemic, the three agencies don't communicate well with each other. FDA regulates milk and dairy products. And CDC is worried about human infection.
The CDC has done a good job with this outbreak, but the USDA, which oversees farms, livestock and meat products, seems confused. They seem unaccustomed to this level of attention, this level of scrutiny.
Why is it so important to highlight the lack of communication between agencies?
Policy wise, this is important. If the right lawmakers pay attention, it can make a difference. It can make all the difference between an explosion and being contained. We saw that with mpox.
This is especially important for those affected. The people who are most at risk are farm workers. We should be talking about how to protect them. Right now, farms are not proactively testing people. They are not proactively testing cattle. Nothing is mandated, it's all voluntary.
How do we balance the need for direct, accurate reporting with the responsibility to avoid spreading unnecessary fear?
We're always thinking about our readers: What do they need to know?
This is something people need to be aware of. But at the same time, I don't want people to panic. One of the ways I've done this is to quote an expert who said, “This is I Things to worry about, and everyone I talk to should worry about, but not necessarily anything. you There is no need to worry.”
Based on your reporting, how worried do you think the public should be about H5N1?
There's a lot we don't know. H5N1 infections aren't always mild. The virus is changing, and we don't know exactly how and when it spreads between people. Every expert I know is on high alert. Many of my sources are very nervous because of the host diversity. It's best adapted to birds, but we know it has the ability to infect a variety of animals, which is unusual. We've seen mammal-to-mammal transmission. It is likely that at some point human-to-human transmission could occur. We don't know when it will get there.
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