How prepared is the US for a possible avian flu pandemic? “THE Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the entire US government are taking this situation very seriously,” CDC director Mandy Cohen assured in an interview. “We had not seen avian influenza in cattle before last week. This is new. It is a reservoir in which the virus can circulate and potentially change”, he observed. After the positivity to the H5N1 strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza was detected in recent days in a worker in the dairy sector in Texas, who entered contact with infected cattle, i Federal officials are therefore preparing for the possibility of additional human cases. And they are testing components to create a vaccine. Two candidates appear well-matched to protect against the H5N1 strain circulating among dairy cattle and birds.
Probably it will be weeks to months before those shield shots can be made available if needed, according to a Health and Human Services official. And senior CDC officials have assured that the agency is well prepared to detect whether a person has H5N1 through the agency's regular surveillance for seasonal influenza at more than 100 public health laboratories throughout the US states, as well as through enhanced monitoring implemented in 2022 for anyone exposed to birds infected with that strain. The debate is open over how ready they are overseas to handle a flu epidemic after the Covid pandemic, and the resulting worst global health crisis in a century, exposed weaknesses in public health infrastructure. Some federal officials say their job is to prepare for the worst, but that the risk to people remains generally low at the moment.
“I think that we can say that the risk of avian influenza remains low for the public because the virus we observe in cattle and in this case humans is the same virus at the genetic level that we found in poultry“, said Cohen. Since avian flu is not a new virus, some experts believe that the country is better prepared to face an epidemic of this type than Covid, but the same experts warn against an attitude of excessive safety. Others, however, underlined the drastic cut in funds for preparing for future pandemics.
If an epidemic were to occur in humans, rapidly increasing vaccination would be crucial, it has been highlighted by many. AND in the country the ten-year plan to modernize influenza vaccination sets the goal of providing the first doses within 12 weeks of the declaration of a possible influenza pandemic. Federal officials highlight some good news: Producing a vaccine that matches this specific strain of the virus and then mass producing it, they assure, is simpler than the effort seen to develop a coronavirus vaccine. That's because vaccines for avian flu already exist and can be modified, experts say, to better protect against this specific strain. Obviously the operation should be reconciled with limitations and needs at a production level. In any case, experts point out, this scenario would probably only occur if there was fairly widespread human-to-human transmission. Finally, there are antiviral drugs approved by the FDA, for those who are infected with avian influenza and, according to experts, there are no signs that the current viral strain is resistant to these therapies.
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