A former director of the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is predicting that the next pandemic could come from the bird flu virus that is spreading rapidly among U.S. poultry and cattle.
“I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time — it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic,” said former CDC chief Robert Redfield during an appearance on NewsNation on Friday.
Redfield served as director of the CDC during the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2018 to 2021.
He added, that once the H5N1 virus gains the ability to spread from human-to-human, “that’s when you’re going to have the pandemic.”
While H5N1 does not currently transmit between humans easily, the World Health Organization warns that as it spreads it has the “potential to mutate to become more contagious.”
H5N1 is a type of bird influenza virus that was first detected in 1996 in domestic water foul in Southern China. It is highly contagious among birds.
A new outbreak of the virus was first detected in 2020 among wild birds in Europe. It has since spread to domestic poultry and occasionally mammal species, such as foxes, sea lions, and cows.
In the U.S. alone, over 96 million commercial poultry and backyard birds across 48 states have been infected with the virus, according to the CDC. The USDA says cattle herds across 12 states have been affected.
So far, three humans — who were all exposed to cattle — have been infected this year, according to the CDC. All have since recovered. The CDC says the health risk of H5N1 to the general public remains low.
Earlier this month, the WHO reported the that first human death due to another strain of bird flu, H5N2, occurred in Mexico this May. It is currently unknown how the victim was exposed to the virus.