We have to talk, again, about bird flu. The discovery in a Louisiana hospital of first severe case in the US and the declaration of a “state of emergency” in California All the alarms have gone off. The ghost of the pandemic has reached the media at breakneck speed.

And yet, authorities have not altered their immediate risk assessment. A risk that, until now, remains “low.” Because?

The largest bird flu outbreak in history (and counting). Yes, with more than 250 million dead birds worldwidewe are experiencing the worst outbreak of bird flu in living memory. An outbreak that has transcended the birds and? has sneaked into the kitchen from the most powerful country in the world: the virus He spent months moving under the radar among the immense cow population of the United States without anyone noticing.

This made experts start to worry. And we are talking about the flu, the changing virus par excellence. As the bird flu grew and the zoonosis became larger, the scientific community became concerned. But when the global outbreak reached such an extremely large scale, the same scientists they started to calm down.

After so much circulation, copies and species, if the virus had not jumped to humans in a contagious way it was because there is something that is slowing it down. We don’t know what it is, nor do we know what its ultimate effectiveness will be: but we know that it is not something easy to circumvent.

Once a certain critical mass has arrived, if it has not happened, it is not easy for it to happen.

Does this mean we won’t have a pandemic? Of course not. This just means we have to be vigilant. As Christina Pagel saidwhen asked how close N5H1 is to becoming a pandemic, “it is not around the corner, but we have it at a very uncomfortable distance.”

Image | USGS

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