NEIDL Researcher Quoted In Washington Post on H5N1
Original article from The Washington Post by Lena H. Sun, December 18, 2024.
The recent bird flu outbreak is being regarded as the largest animal disease outbreak on record, raising concerns about its potential to spark a pandemic.
But the virus is changing, said John Connor, an an associate professor of microbiology at Boston University. “It is essentially going to the gym all the time and training to be better,” Connor said at a webinar on H5N1 this week hosted by hosted by Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases. “The virus is not just getting into birds, now it’s getting into cows. There’s evidence that it’s getting into other animals, cats, dogs, mink,” he said. “Now what we are seeing is that this is a virus that used to be only good at breaking and entering into bird cells and causing disease there and transmitting there, now its getting better at breaking and entering into a bunch of other cells.”
But he cautioned, “Right now we’re seeing a lot of breaking and entering in neighborhoods near us, but not our neighborhood.”
Health officials declined to share details about the Louisiana person’s symptoms and timeline of their illness for privacy reasons. On Monday, Louisiana sent a health alert to the state’s clinicians asking them to consider possible H5N1 virus infection in people with symptoms of acute respiratory illness or pink eye and who had exposure history within 10 days of the start of their symptoms. The state said it detected the presumptive positive case this past Thursday.