Usually, when there’s a bird flu outbreak, scientists see sick birds before sick humans. This strain of flu doesn’t appear to cause symptoms in poultry, which makes it hard to trace and difficult to predict. When the 1997 bird flu hit, on the other hand, it killed nearly 100 percent of flu-infected chickens.
Another thing worth noting is that the H7 strain of flu hasn’t been identified in humans before, according to Osterholm. That means that we have no residual protection or immunity to the disease, which matters for two reasons: It means this flu could make us sicker, and that the vaccine will probably need more antigen in each dose to be effective. If we need more antigen—Osterholm guesses we’ll need 3 or 4 times as much—for each vaccine, that’s fewer vaccines to go around.
Is the US prepared for a bird flu pandemic?
As of Friday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had issued an advisory to doctors asking them to help identify any bird flu-like cases. The CDC has also started working on making a “seed strain,” which is essentially a prototype vaccine that can be copied by pharmaceutical companies to produce a vaccine.
Still, vaccines aren’t perfect. Osterholm emphasizes that avian flu vaccines aren’t 100 percent effective: “It would take months to do it,” he said, and there wouldn’t be enough of the vaccine to be distributed worldwide, at least not at first. So far there haven’t been any reports of people hoarding Tamiflu, the antiviral medicine people whose demand soared as fears rose around the avian flu outbreak in 2005.
The next flu pandemic?
