by Lara FarrarOctober 2, 2024 4:27 pm

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• https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/02/theres-an-international-bird-flu-summit-in-arkansas-this-week-and-this-is-why-it-is-important

With the race on to investigate the first possible human-to-human infections of bird flu in the United States, avian flu experts from around the world are meeting in Fayetteville this week to contain the spread.

This is the second year for the International Avian Influenza and One Health Emerging Issues Summit, a four-day conference held virtually and in-person at the Don Tyson Center for Agricultural Sciences in Fayetteville, part of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

The summit is significant because there are not many other conferences in the United States, or even globally, that bring together international experts to discuss the disease, which is increasingly alarming scientists as it spreads through poultry and infects other species. 

“We decided to do this summit because the world is getting hit very badly by this virus that is now basically a pandemic,” said Guillermo Tellez-Isaias, the summit’s organizer and a research professor in the Center of Excellence in Poultry Science, a unit of both the Division of Agriculture and the University of Arkansas Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences. “It is present in all continents now, even Antarctica.” 

“We are facing a unique virus that has been able to adapt and infect other species that it traditionally did not used to infect,” Tellez-Isaias told Arkansas Times. (In Vietnam, 47 tigers, three lions and a panther died in zoos because of bird flu, Agence France-Presse reported Wednesday. In 2023, avian influenza killed tens of thousands of pelicans and more than 700 sea lions in Peru.)

In July, Reuters published a report based on interviews with more than a dozen disease experts who characterized the avian flu as a “pandemic unfolding in slow motion.” The experts said its rapid spread to more than 100 dairy herds in the U.S., as well as infections found in other mammals including alpacas and house cats, is an alarming indication that bird flu could soon be transmissible between humans.

In fact, this scenario may already be unfolding in Missouri. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that seven people who came into contact with an avian flu patient in Missouri later showed symptoms of a respiratory illness. In humans, avian flu symptoms include fever, body aches, headache and shortness of breath. Officials are testing them for antibodies to the H5N1 avian flu strain, which would indicate they had been infected by avian flu.

Since April 2024, the CDC reports that there have been 14 human cases of avian influenza in the U.S. All but one were the result of direct contact with sick cows or poultry. The source of the most recent human case, the one in Missouri that may have resulted in human-to-human transmission, is still unknown. (Note, the CDC says the immediate risk to the general public from bird flu remains low.)

It would be prudent not to forget that a pandemic in 1918 that killed at least 50 million people globally, known as the Spanish flu, was caused by a virus “with genes of avian origin,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although the origin of that influenza strain is not known, the 1918 outbreak was called the Spanish flu because it killed millions of people in Spain as it spread worldwide. About 500 million people, or half the world’s population at the time, contracted the Spanish flu, making it the worst pandemic in modern history. (Strains of the disease have continued to infect humans globally, with some outbreaks resulting in notably high fatality rates nearing 50% of those infected.) 

Though the data remains imprecise, estimates of global deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic range from about 7 million to close to 20 million, less than half of the death toll of the Spanish flu.  

While a great deal of the content presented at the International Avian Flu Summit this week is esoterically scientific in nature, and largely focusing on the risks the bird flu continues to pose to the poultry industry, the event is again notable in relation to COVID-19. 

The national and international response to the coronavirus pandemic was catastrophically disorganized and shockingly dysfunctional, revealing not just cracks, but gaping fissures, in unquestionably broken public and global health systems that led to countless unnecessary deaths.

The response to COVID was so bad, The Lancet labeled it a “massive global failure” in a 2022 report from the medical journal’s COVID-19 commission. The death toll from the coronavirus “is both a profound tragedy and a massive global failure at multiple levels,” the Lancet commission wrote. “Too many governments have failed to adhere to basic norms of institutional rationality and transparency, too many people – often influenced by misinformation – have disrespected and protested against basic public health precautions, and the world’s major powers have failed to collaborate and control the pandemic.” 

About 1,000 people representing 55 countries are taking part in the International Avian Flu Summit. Organizer Tellez-Isaias, the UA poultry professor, said the conference is intended to address some of the failures that occurred during COVID-19. 

“If this virus is able to adapt to humans, it will make COVID-19 look like a small cold compared to the mortality that the human race could see,” Tellez-Isaias said. “It happened before with the 1918 Spanish flu. It could happen again. We need to prepare ourselves and work together. This is serious.” 

Throughout the week, International Avian Influenza Summit participants will craft recommendations centered on the avian flu and global efforts, or lack thereof, to contain it and monitor its spread in commercial farming, wildlife and humans. The recommendations will be presented to the World Health Organization, the CDC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Organization for Animal Health, among others, Tellez-Isaias said.

“This is something that is going to have to involve the collaboration of agencies that involve human and animal health at all levels in all countries,” Tellez-Isaias said. “What we are facing is a problem that needs to be controlled as soon as possible.” 

Undoubtedly the poultry industry in Arkansas and elsewhere has a vested interest in controlling bird flu. Infections in Arkansas have been sporadic and mostly isolated, but the industry has had to cull millions of birds.

The poultry sector engages in numerous unsavory business practices, but if it takes Big Chicken to get policymakers to pay attention to what could become another global pandemic in an instant, then kudos to Tellez-Isaias and his colleagues for making this very important summit happen.