When H5N1 avian influenza started spreading among dairy cattle across the U.S. this year, regulators warned against consuming unpasteurized milk. What happened? Raw milk sales went up.
Distributors of this unsafe-for-human-consumption product deny H5N1—which has the potential to sicken millions of people—is a danger. Dairy farmers decline to allow disease detectives onto their properties.
And there’s a frankly scarily high likelihood that it’s not an “if” but a “when” – some forecasters like the ALERT team, who are usually fairly accurate, give H5N1 turning into a pandemic about a 25% chance in the coming decade, which would generally mean it’d successfully specialized for infecting human lung tissues.
If or when that pandemic does happen, there’s a chance it’d be extremely bad. Estimates for the infection fatality rate (IFR) range anywhere from 1 to 80%, eg. this article estimates 14 – 33%, but this article estimates 30 – 80% for the current strains. Needless to say that even a 10% fatality rate would be disastrous, something like 20x – 50x worse than COVID. Note that the IFR is distinct from the case fatality rate (CFR) which is currently something like 50% – 80%, but those are only the cases we know of and the ones bad enough to end up in hospital, but based on eg. wastewater studies the number of total infected is probably a lot higher than the cases we’ve seen so far.
Some estimates for eg the 1918 pandemic put its IFR at around 2% but some studies have pointed out it’s likely that that’s an underestimate, and eg. the ALERT team gives it a ~60% chance that the IFR for H5N1 would be ≥10%. Not letting this thing turn into a pandemic should be a top priority for health authorities, but nobody seems to be willing to actually take the steps needed, such as shutting down mink farms here in Finland – our extremist right-wing government is instead paying subsidies to a dying industry that centers around animal torture even though it’s a prime zoonosis candidate. Conservatives will always prioritize money over lives.
And let’s not forget that H5N1 is just one of the highly pathogenic avian influenzas going around right now, although it is by far the most pressing one at the moment.