Sleep and attention in Alzheimer's Disease. Hennawy M, Sabovich S, Liu CS, Herrmann N, Lanctôt KL. Sustained attention across the life span in a sample of 10,000: Dissociating ability and strategy. The Principles of Psychology, William James (1890).įortenbaugh FC, DeGutis J, Germine L, et al. With so much – often understandable – mistrust in our current political leadership, authorities like chief medical officers and independent government advisers become crucial.Īt the moment most governments aren’t paying attention to bird flu: they’re more interested in another AI (artificial intelligence) rather than this AI (avian influenza), but the avian influenza threat is real, and needs much more immediate attention and preparation.Classics in the History of Psychology. With post Covid-19 fatigue, the bigger problem is bringing the public along and communicating the facts so that they are trusted and believed. Preparation must also involve appropriate PPE for healthcare workers to protect against a respiratory disease (flu) and diagnostics to quickly identify if someone is infectious in hospitals.Īll of these issues are solvable with precise planning, collaboration across countries, scientific ingenuity and good leadership. But again, getting doses to all parts of the world is a challenge given shortages.
In addition, the FDA-approved antiviral treatments for seasonal influenza could also work against bird flu. The world’s population is almost 8 billion. There’s another H5N1 vaccine which is non-egg based, but they could have a maximum of 150m doses ready within six months. If bird flu has killed off many of the chickens, then egg shortages are likely. But this is a challenge because most influenza vaccines are created by incubating doses in chicken eggs (called egg-based production). The information has been shared with vaccine manufacturers to start the process of stockpiling adequate doses. Rebecca Katz, professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, has noted that a H5 candidate vaccine virus recently produced by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is likely to provide good protection against the circulating H5N1 viruses. The US government is already moving in this direction. The cornerstone of infectious disease preparedness is in: surveillance (to know what strain is spreading and where in birds) testing (to identify disease quickly in humans) vaccines (for protection against disease and death) and antivirals (to improve clinical outcomes). This is a disease with an estimated 50-60% fatality rate in humans, including children. So that if a certain set of mutations do occur and we see an outbreak in humans in Peru or China or Britain, that the harm it could cause is minimal. To those of us scientists working in global health, there are enough concerning signals that action should already be happening. And a prime minister or health secretary might say, “Why prepare for something that might never happen?” So right now, H5N1 is a theoretical risk for the next human pandemic, rather than one requiring urgency in response today.
So far, the virus has been able to make one of these changes, but not the other two. In order to spread efficiently to humans, H5 would need three major categories of genetic changes, according to bird flu expert Prof Richard Webby. A new research pre-print from Canada showed that H5N1 samples could spread efficiently between ferrets with fatal outcomes. It is not yet 100% clear what’s happening.īut the risk of spread among mammals is ever-present.
A more likely hypothesis is that these outbreaks are groups of animals feeding on infected birds. But the large number of cases in these outbreaks suggest the possibility of mammal-to-mammal transmission, although this hasn’t been confirmed yet by genetic sequencing. Normally, even if an animal catches H5N1 from a bird, it can’t pass it to other mammals. Then several dolphins in Britain and the US died of H5N1. In January and February this year, more than 3,000 sea lions died of bird flu in Peru (where the death toll in wild birds reached an estimated 50,000). Since November, the signals emerging across the world continue to be worrying. Avian flu has a near 100% fatality rate in most poultry, which led to shortages of not only turkey for Christmas but also eggs, as farm after farm was decimated by the disease. When infected wild birds encountered domestic birds (such as by flying over and defecating on them underneath), huge problems emerged.
It’s incredibly infectious, where one bird could infect as many as 100 others. The virus had become endemic in most wild bird populations. I first wrote about bird flu in November, when domestic birds in Britain were put into an indoor lockdown.
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