I am a writer, journalist, professor, systems modeler, computational and digital health expert, avocado-eater, and entrepreneur, not always in that order.highly pathogenic avian influenza before such animals are transported to a different state. This was prompted by the discovery of the virus in samples of pasteurized milk taken by the Food and Drug Administration .
Whenever a harmful virus—whether it’s an influenza virus, a coronavirus or some other virus—is circulating widely among some other animal population, the things to watch out for is whether that virus has the capability of consistently infecting humans and what the human immune response to this strain might be. Avian influenza strains are different from human influenza strains.
So far, aside from an occasional human infection, there’s been no indication that this H5N1 avian influenza virus can consistently jump to humans. That should be comforting news for you, assuming that you don’t have wings, a beak or an udder. There’s no reason right now to avoid eating beef or drinking milk, unless you happen to be vegan.
Even if the H5N1 avian flu virus were to jump to humans, don’t utter the “p” word just yet. For a pandemic to even be a possibility, a novel virus has to demonstrate sustained human-to-human transmission of the virus. In other words, a human infected with the virus has to be able to routinely pass it along to another human. There’s certainly been no indication of that yet for the H5N1 avian influenza virus with an emphasis on the word “yet.