00:00 (chicken clucking)
00:01 Bird flu has been around for many years,
00:03 but recent outbreaks have raised concerns
00:06 that it could spread to humans and impact our economy.
00:09 Since 2022, H5N1 has infected
00:13 more than 90 million chickens, 9,000 wild birds,
00:18 34 dairy herds, and cattle in nine states.
00:22 Officials are calling it an animal pandemic
00:24 that could spread to humans.
00:26 I'm Mia de Graaf, I'm a health editor at Business Insider,
00:29 and today we're going to be talking about bird flu.
00:32 Bird flu is a virus.
00:33 The type we're talking about today is called H5N1.
00:37 This highly contagious form of bird flu,
00:41 which is known as 2344B, first emerged in 2020.
00:46 It was seen in birds in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
00:51 In 2021, it was detected in North America.
00:54 This bird flu is different
00:55 from previous strains in a few ways.
00:57 It's more lethal.
00:58 We're seeing unusually high rates of death,
01:01 for example, among chickens, a 90% death rate.
01:04 What's been alarming about this outbreak
01:07 is that we've seen it move from mammal to mammal.
01:10 There's a lot of migration going on right now,
01:12 and that's quite unusual.
01:14 We've seen it in cows.
01:15 We've seen it in domestic cats, domestic dogs.
01:19 We've also seen it in foxes and sea lions,
01:21 and we've seen it in humans.
01:23 One person in Colorado who was in close contact
01:27 with poultry that was being culled,
01:29 and then one farm worker in Texas
01:31 who was in close contact with a cow who was infected.
01:34 We haven't yet seen human-to-human transmission,
01:38 but those kinds of interactions, that is cause for concern.
01:41 Sometimes this virus doesn't have very clear symptoms.
01:45 You might just be a little groggy.
01:47 It's kind of the same as a flu.
01:49 You might have muscle aches.
01:51 You might have a headache, but it can range.
01:53 The cost of this is huge.
01:56 The US government has a pretty blunt approach
01:59 to trying to curtail this outbreak.
02:01 Basically, they pay farms to proactively kill
02:05 all of its chicken, turkey, any poultry
02:09 that may have been exposed to bird flu.
02:11 In 2023, the US government paid farms half a billion dollars
02:16 for the animals that they killed,
02:18 proactively preventing bird flu.
02:20 Bird flu outbreaks definitely drive up
02:22 the price of grocery store items,
02:24 the reason being that you suddenly have a scarcity
02:26 of product due to culls, but the demand hasn't changed.
02:30 So you might have seen in recent years
02:32 that sometimes, independent of inflation,
02:35 there'll be these fluctuations in the price of, say, eggs.
02:38 You might get your normal carton of eggs
02:40 that would cost $3 is suddenly costing $7.
02:44 The 2022 bird flu outbreak cost the US poultry industry
02:48 around $3 billion.
02:51 The way bird flu is contracted
02:53 is really through close contact with an infected animal.
02:57 If you're worried about contracting bird flu,
03:00 definitely do not consume raw milk.
03:03 Anything that's unpasteurized,
03:05 it's risky at the best of times,
03:07 but right now, it's really not something you want to do.
03:09 Generally, the FDA says that pasteurized products are safe,
03:13 but if you are concerned about it,
03:15 just make sure you're cooking things extra good.
03:18 The best way to stay safe as farm workers
03:20 is really to have protective gear,
03:22 so goggles, masks, gloves,
03:25 things that will protect them from coming into contact
03:28 with infected bodily fluids,
03:30 respiratory droplets, feces, anything like that.
03:33 If these workers are given the right protection
03:36 and also the right training,
03:38 they could actually play a really crucial role
03:40 in helping us to detect and curtail the spread of this virus.
03:44 It's higher stakes than before, for sure.
03:47 There are more countries involved.
03:49 There are more species involved.
03:51 There are more opportunities for this virus
03:53 to mutate and spread,
03:55 but the one thing I can say about flu
03:57 is that it is really surprising,
03:59 sometimes in positive ways.
04:02 So we've been monitoring this H5N1 for years.
04:05 In 1997, H5N1 was seen in humans for the first time
04:10 in workers in Hong Kong,
04:12 and everyone thought that this was then
04:14 gonna become the big pandemic.
04:15 It was actually the leading candidate ahead of a coronavirus
04:18 for what we thought would be a global pandemic,
04:21 but that wasn't the case.
04:22 Flu is often a sort of right place, right time kind of thing
04:26 where it could bubble up into a huge outbreak.
04:29 This has been in the right place at the right time
04:32 so many times, and it still hasn't got there.
04:35 So scientists are saying that is some cause for optimism.
04:38 The fact that this hasn't exploded
04:40 maybe suggests that it's not going to get there.
04:43 The other thing, though, is that it does show us
04:45 how little we really know about flu.
04:47 We keep thinking that we understand where it's gonna go,
04:49 and then it doesn't go that way.
04:51 People at home don't need to panic about bird flu right now.
04:55 But this is certainly a rapidly evolving situation
04:58 that the government and scientists are monitoring closely.
05:02 [laughter]
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