#18,824
Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the rapid spread of HPAI H5 in the United States - and around the world - is how little is actually being done to try to prevent it from becoming the next pandemic.
Last March - in Nature: Lengthy Delays in H5N1 Genome Submissions to GISAID - we learned that the average delay for countries to submit non-human sequences to GISAID is 7 months, and that Canada came in last at 20 months.Many countries appear willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on purchasing vaccines (which may - or may not - prove effective), but at the same time they make the testing of livestock largely voluntary, and are slow to share outbreak information.
Despite the loss of tens of millions of lives and trillions of dollars during the COVID pandemic we seem unwilling to commit adequate resources to try to prevent the next global health crisis.Instead, we either deny the potential threat even exists, or we shrug our shoulders and say `nothing can be done'. Either way, historians a hundred years from now are going to have a field day debating what kind of mass delusion paved the way to our failure to act.
Remarkably, more than half of all reported cases (n=643) in the United States since 2022 have come from just 6 states. Many states have only reported a small handful.
Admittedly, most of the public seem to think avian flu is either a hoax, `a planned event', or simply overblown (see Two Surveys (UK & U.S.) Illustrating The Public's Lack of Concern Over Avian Flu), all of which highlights the persuasive power of social media.
But even if HPAI H5 fizzles, there will be another emerging pathogenic threat to take its place. Nature is nothing, if not persistent.
Preventative steps, such as outlined in the following paper, should help reduce the risks from HPAI, along with a wide variety of other zoonotic threats; assuming we can be bothered to implement them.
I've only posted the abstract and some excerpts, so follow the link to read it in its entirety.
I'll have a brief postscript after the break.
Three things we can do now to reduce the risk of avian influenza spillovers
Kenneth B. Yeh kyeh@mriglobal.org, William P. Bahnfleth, Elaine Bradforda, +7 , and Matthew Scotch
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5100-9724
July 30, 2025 122 (31) e2503565122
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2503565122Concern grows daily over the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) across the globe. We call for three measures to radically lower the risk of a new influenza pandemic: (i) improved wildlife, agricultural, and human sampling for One Health surveillance; (ii) accelerated implementation of new indoor air engineering standards (American Society of Heating, Ventilating, and Air-conditioning Engineers [ASHRAE] Standard 241) and associated research on agent fate to significantly lower the potential for human respiratory infection; and (iii) continued investments in animal and human vaccines, along with improved public health communication that address the mechanisms of health disinformation campaigns. Given the stakes, it’s imperative that we act quickly.
An avian influenza pandemic remains within the realm of possibility. To reduce the risk, we need to engage in a One Health approach that includes wildlife, agricultural, and human sampling; implement new indoor air engineering standards; and invest more in animal and human vaccines, while improving public health communication to elucidate the mechanisms of health disinformation campaigns.
(SNIP)
In an era during which misinformation and disinformation in health communication is a reality, understanding its origins and impact on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response is critical for pandemic preparedness. AI technologies for tracking and detection of misinformation and disinformation are already being used by governments and have the potential to improve early detection and response to these threats. Tailored public health messaging for health promotion can be proactive and effective when informed by active tracking and detection of fake news.In summary, a broader research agenda should address these three additional critical areas for managing spillover and preventing a pandemic influenza—environmental surveillance, research and development in bioaerosols, and the enlisting of social and political scientists and new AI methods to better understand and respond to the infodemic around pandemics. While vaccines and other biomedical countermeasures are important, they are just part of the remedy.Funding for pandemic preparedness should remain a priority. Improving early detection and response within agricultural settings will depend on better financial and policy incentives to help the farmers who are at the frontline and bear much of the risk. We need earlier, faster, and more efficient real-time pathogen surveillance and high-throughput sequencing in order to reduce risks to food security, minimize economic disruption, and limit the potential for high human mortality from agricultural-origin spillovers.Broad monitoring of infected individuals and animals, development of mitigation strategies, development of community-targeted communication strategies, and adequate support for farmers across North America through a One Health approach would help control the virus before it gives rise to a pandemic. The One Health approach further builds resilience in the system since we require an integrated approach which reduces the shedding of virus by wildlife, the transmission to the bridging host, amplification and reassortment in the bridging host, and then infection of the human population. A series of environmental, ecological, veterinary, human, and built environment countermeasures is required to achieve this.It is not too late to manage spillover events and keep one step ahead of HPAI. But public health officials and researchers must make this a priority—and soon.
While there is nothing radical, unique, or unreasonable in these suggestions - prevention has always been a much harder sell than preparedness. At least with preparedness, officials can point to stockpiled vaccines, PPEs, or body bags, as lifesaving assets.
But with prevention - even if you manage to forestall the next pandemic by one, two, or even five years - eventually one will beat our defenses and the public will label prevention as a failure.
So, while I consider these to be essential and reasonable suggestions, there doesn't seem to be much political will to implement them.
Hopefully that will change.
But if not, papers like this will still be valuable to those who will have to prepare for the inevitable pandemic-after-next.
