After Corona now the bird flu?
Experts warn of signs of a new pandemic
Created: 08/31/2022, 17:09
By: Nadja Zinsmeister
Experts in Europe are currently concerned about serious outbreaks of a bird flu subtype "H5N1" in birds.
With the rapid spread of the virus, is a new pandemic on the horizon?
Munich – Even after two years since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, the fight against the virus has still not been won.
Conjecture and research suggest the virus originally came from wild animals sold in China.
Now there could be growing concern about a new virus, which is currently also circulating among animals, at least in Europe.
It is the H5N1 subtype of bird flu.
Severe bird flu outbreak in England and Germany
England is battling a particularly severe bird flu outbreak this year in the Farne Islands in the north-east of the country.
By the end of July, specialists collected more than 3,000 dead birds there.
In the nearly 100 years that the National Trust has overseen the Farne Islands, there has never been a situation that "has been so threatening to our already vulnerable seabird populations," the islands' director, Simon Lee, told the PA news agency .
As the British newspaper
Metro
reports, around 22 million birds died last year.
The "H5N1" subtype was particularly responsible for the outbreak.
An eider duck lies dead on the beach in Nordstrand in Schleswig-Holstein.
She died from bird flu.
© Axel Heimken/dpa/archive image
In Germany, too, more than 3,000 dead birds were found this summer on the North Sea coast, having died of bird flu.
At least in Germany, the virus usually only occurs in the winter months.
Bird flu: transmission to humans
Even if it is very rare, bird flu, also known as Abviere influenza, can also spread to humans and, according to the Robert Koch Institute, sometimes cause serious illnesses there.
Professor Paul Hunter, an infectious disease expert at the University of East Anglia, told the
Mail Online
that "the question is not 'if' avian flu will cause another outbreak in humans, but 'when'".
It is not possible to predict how many years this could take, but the risk increases as the virus spreads.
Keith Neal, also a professor of epidemiology of infectious diseases, currently sees the threat more in the normal winter flu.
"We know seasonal flu is coming, bird flu is on the horizon - it could come," he told the
Mail Online
.
However, the more both viruses circulate, the higher the probability that the two will eventually interact with each other.
Bird flu in particular is the more dangerous flu because, unlike normal flu, we humans have no natural protection against it.
Recently, children in India have been infected with a new virus.
The symptoms of the "tomato flu" are similar to those of a Covid 19 disease.
Next pandemic only after genetic modification of bird flu
also dr
Simon Clarke, a microbiologist, spoke to the newspaper, at least for the time being, of no acute signs that the current serious outbreaks of the "H5N1" type of bird flu are spreading to humans in large numbers.
It is not tailored enough to humans and would first have to spread to other animal species that are genetically more similar to humans.
An example of this would be pigs.
That happened in 2009 with H1N1 swine flu, which killed nearly 300,000 people.
(
nz
)