The CDC recently reported findings from an analysis of specimens collected from the patient in Louisiana who became severely ill from H5N1 avian flu, and found genetic mutations that, according to Politico, "may enhance the virus' ability to infect humans."
The CDC's report summary states:
CDC has sequenced the influenza viruses in specimens collected from the patient in Louisiana who was infected with, and became severely ill from HPAI A(H5N1) virus. The genomic sequences were compared to other HPAI A(H5N1) sequences from dairy cows, wild birds and poultry, as well as previous human cases and were identified as the D1.1 genotype. The analysis identified low frequency mutations in the hemagglutinin gene of a sample sequenced from the patient, which were not found in virus sequences from poultry samples collected on the patient's property, suggesting the changes emerged in the patient after infection.
On the heels of these findings, former White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said in an interview with CNN on December 27 that she fears we aren't doing enough to stop a coming avian flu pandemic. She also expressed concern that because we aren't testing widely, we don't have a real handle on how widespread the virus already is. Politico reports:
"Our No. 1 principle in preventing pandemics is detect, and if you go to the CDC website, you can see that they are monitoring more than 10,000 exposures, but they've only tested 530," she said. "That means we're not testing enough. And we know from other viruses that a lot of the spread can be asymptomatic. So we kind of have our head in the sand about how widespread this is from the zoonotic standpoint, from the animal to human standpoint."
Birx added that her greatest fear is someone getting infected with bird flu during the regular seasonal flu, potentially triggering mutations that make the former far more infectious to humans.
I transcribed the rest of the interview, which is located on the CNN website:
Birx: "If you have that co-infection, then you can share genes. . . In the spring and the summer, where we had all of the dairy cattle to farm worker exposure, we didn't have human flu circulating. So now we're entering into a much more dangerous period, yet we're still not testing. And we should be providing tests free of charge to dairy farm workers so they can test anonymously weekly, because they'll want to know if they have both cases of potential flus co-circulating in their own bodies, to protect their families."
Host: "So, given this double whammy that you've laid out, do you think it's just a matter of time until there's a full-fledged pandemic here?"
Birx: "Well, certainly we're setting ourselves up for that potential . . . I flash back to January of 2020, and I'm hearing the same words come out of the CDC… 'low risk,' 'low risk of human to human transmission.' Didn't we hear that from the WHO and the CDC about COVID? So I think our way through this is to use 21st century technology. Remember it was the private sector that gave us tests within weeks. We went from 20,000 tests to 2 million tests. So if we got the private sector engaged in our response they would help us get tests out to all of the dairy farmers, all the poultry farmers, where they could test both the chickens and the people exposed to the chickens, and then we would know how far spread this virus was. Right now we're just looking for symptoms again. We should never be tracking viruses through symptoms. You don't see a virus through symptoms, you see a virus through a tests. And we know with COVID most of the spread was asymptomatic. If we had been testing in January, as many other countries were, we wouldn't have had the spread that we had . . . Our agencies are making the same mistakes they made with COVID. The number two principle of pandemic is to test. And the only way to detect for viruses is to test. You cannot see a virus through symptoms, you miss so many cases. Yet we're still talking about 'flu-like illness.' Well, there is no 'flu-like illness'! There's RSV… there's mycoplasma pneumonia circulating right now, there's flu circulating right now, and soon there'll be COVID circulating. Those are all cough-y respiratory illnesses that look the same. We should not be tracking illnesses by symptoms, we should track them only by testing, so that parents know whether their child has RSV or flu, so they can protect their grandparents. And so that grandparents can know whether they have RSV or flu or COVID, because flu and COVID are treatable. So we need diagnostic tests out there."
Previously: Dr. Deborah Birx: 'To be cavalier about getting repetitive COVID infections is really a huge mistake'