Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield has predicted a bird flu pandemic will happen as the virus continues to spread across cow herds in the US. Animal outbreaks of the virus have been reported at dozens of dairy cow farms and more than 1,000 poultry flocks, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Four human infections have been reported among the hundreds of thousands of people who work at US poultry and dairy farms, though that may be an undercount.
Bird flu outbreak fears soar as virus survives milk pasteurization in test Top CDC official fears bird flu testing is too low as experts prepare for surge Worldwide, doctors have detected 15 human infections caused by the widely circulating bird flu strain H5N1. That count includes one death - a 38-year-old woman in southern China in 2022 - but most people had either no symptoms or only mild ones, according to the CDC. In an interview with NewsNation on Friday, Redfield said he’s concerned about the rising number of human infections in the US.
Redfield, who served as CDC Director from 2018 to 2021, said: “I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic.” Redfield also noted that bird flu has a “significant mortality” when it enters humans compared to Covid , predicting the mortality of bird flu is “probably somewhere between 25 and 20 percent mortality..
