12 months and 70 cases since the first human bird flu infection

[struggle4progress]

ByYouri Benadjaoud and Tommy Brooksbank
March 31, 2025, 11:22 PM

One year ago, the first bird flu infection in a human in the United States was reported in a Texas dairy worker, just weeks after the virus had been found in cattle for the first time ever ...

In the 12 months since the first human case, at least 70 people have been infected. There was one death linked to a human infected with bird flu in Louisiana.

ABC News' medical correspondent Dr. Darien Sutton was granted rare access inside the race to stop bird flu at Michigan State University's Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. He aimed to better understand how researchers are trying to curb the spread in animals -- and why that may help protect us from an outbreak among humans.

"We're a network of more than 60 academic, state and federal laboratories that are the first line of defense in the case of a high consequence animal disease outbreak," Dr. Kimberly Dodd, dean of the college of veterinary medicine at Michigan State University, told Sutton ...

https://abcnews.go.com/US/12-months-70-cases-human-bird-flu-infection/story?id=120355303

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1. Democrats investigating RFK Jr. bird flu response

House Democrats are investigating Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his bird flu response, which they called “dangerous and reckless.”

In a Tuesday letter addressed to Kennedy, a group of Democrats said they were “troubled to hear that you consider the ‘possibility of letting run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,’ to be a potentially effective strategy to end the bird flu epidemic” ...

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5227902-house-democrats-bird-flu-rfk-response/

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2. Bird Flu's Unprecedented Global Spread Sparks Alarm

Aude Lecrubier
April 02, 2025

Rapid spread of the H5N1 avian influenza virus has reached an “unprecedented” scale this season, wiping out hundreds of millions of birds worldwide and increasingly infecting mammals, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations warned on March 16. The spread of the virus poses significant risks from food and public health perspectives.

In a statement, FAO deputy director general Godfrey Magwenzi stressed that the crisis threatens to have “serious impacts on food security and food supply in countries.”

In the United States, for instance, egg prices hit record highs in February as workers were forced to cull more than 166 million birds, primarily laying hens, according to the FAO. The organization also reported that “at least 300 new species of wild birds have been affected since 2021, posing a serious threat to biodiversity” ...

Beyond the food crisis, the intense circulation of the virus has led to spillover from birds to mammals, raising alarms among researchers ...

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/bird-flus-unprecedented-global-spread-sparks-alarm-2025a10007w2?form=fpf