The writer Benito Pérez Galdós made a warning in 1884, at the beginning of a plague of cholera in Spain: “The epidemics, apparently, also feel their decline, like the royal races and even the commoners, which would be a great consolation for humanity if history did not teach us that after the ending of one plague comes the appearance of another ”. Two Chinese scientists, George Fu Gao and Weifeng Shi, also remember this Thursday in the magazine Science that after the covid another pandemic may arrive, as has always happened for millennia. And researchers point to one suspect: the H5N8 bird flu virus.
The pathogen is an old acquaintance. It has been circulating in Europe since 2014, causing outbreaks that have affected millions of wild and poultry birds, according to the European agency dedicated to the control of infectious diseases, the ECDC. On February 20, 2021, Russia warned that the virus had made the leap to humans for the first time. Seven workers were infected on a gigantic farm with 900,000 laying hens in the Astrakhan region, in the south of the country. None of the seven had symptoms.
The virus is also in Spain. The Ministry of Agriculture has declared three outbreaks in wild birds in recent months, after the appearance in November of a dying peregrine falcon in Noja (Cantabria) and the discovery in January three storks and a dead goose in the Marshes of Ampurdán (Girona) and the remains of another goose in the Laguna Grande de Villafáfila (Zamora). The ministry sent a reassuring message after communicating this latest event, on February 5: “The detection of this case does not imply a risk to public health, since genetic studies based on the analysis of the complete virus sequences show that it is it is an avian virus with no specific affinity for humans ”.
Chinese scientists George Fu Gao and Weifeng Shi warn that bird flu viruses can cause “disastrous pandemics”
The two Chinese experts are less optimistic. “The worldwide spread of H5N8 avian influenza viruses is a public health problem,” they warn in the magazine Science. George fu gao is the director general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Weifeng Shi is the director of the Reference Laboratory for Emerging Infectious Diseases at Shandong Universities. Both participated in the identification of the new coronavirus in December 2019. In his view, avian flu viruses can cause “disastrous pandemics” in humans.
At least 46 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa have reported deadly outbreaks of H5N8 in birds. The Chinese researchers stress that the virus of the seven Russian workers belonged to subgroup 2.3.4.4b, with some “worrisome” mutations which appear to increase their affinity for human cells. This same variant of the virus has caused the slaughter of more than 20 million poultry in South Korea and Japan, warn Fu Gao and Shi. “It is imperative that the global spread and potential risk of H5N8 avian influenza viruses to poultry, wild birds and global public health is not ignored,” they warn.
To the vet Elisa perez, an expert in emerging viruses, is surprised by the alarm signal sent by the two Chinese experts. The virologist, from the Animal Health Research Center (Valdeolmos, Community of Madrid), recalls that the European agency ECDC did on February 24 a risk assessment and concluded that it was “low” for workers in the poultry sector and “very low” for the general population. The organization then detailed that 1,700 outbreaks of H5N8 or similar viruses had been registered in birds since October 2020 in the EU and in its surroundings, with some 1,900 people involved in dangerous activities – such as the slaughter of infected animals – in seven countries, without detecting a single case in humans.
“If the virus enters a macro-farm there is no one to stop it. It is a time bomb ”, warns the virologist Elisa Pérez
On March 23, in fact, the Ministry of Agriculture and the autonomous communities decided to lower strict biosafety standards that were in force, such as the ban on keeping domestic birds outdoors. The authorities, in a message sent to specialized veterinarians, justified their decision in “reducing the risk of introduction of influenza [gripe] birds in Spain after the end of the migratory period of wintering wild birds from Northern and Central European countries ”and in the absence of cases since January.
Pérez highlights a “very striking” feature of the H5N8 flu: it also kills wild birds. “They are the natural reservoir of influenza viruses and it is very rare that they have severe symptoms, but this year has been a massacre in northern Europe,” he explains. The virologist only remembers two other similar cases: the H5N1 flu at the beginning of the 21st century and a wave of outbreaks of the same H5N8 subtype in 2016 and 2017 in Europe. Pérez points to the gigantic poultry farms. “On farms like the one in Russia, with almost a million chickens in the same place, there is a very high risk of mutation. If the virus enters a macro-farm there is no one to stop it. It is a time bomb, “he warns.
The two Chinese experts, however, believe that replacing small family farms with large industrial farms, theoretically with strict biosecurity measures, will help reduce the risk of virus leap from birds to humans. In Spain, the Rujamar company announced in 2019 an investment of 25 million euros to build a macro farm with 1.35 million chickens in San Clemente (Cuenca). In Spanish farms there are about 46 million laying hens, according to the official census, with more than 817 million birds slaughtered for meat in 2019.
“The flu virus has the potential to generate a pandemic much worse than the one we are suffering now,” agrees virologist María Montoya.
Just as the new coronavirus has its characteristic spicules, influenza viruses have two proteins on their surface, hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), with different numbered subtypes, hence the name H5N8. Virologist Maria Montoya, from the CSIC, recalls that viruses with H5 jump from time to time from birds to people. H5N1 has caused hundreds of human cases, many of them lethal, since their identification in Hong Kong in 1997.
Montoya emphasizes that it is one thing to jump from birds to humans and quite another to go from human to human. “The times that H5 has jumped at people it has been quite devastating but, luckily, the transmission from human to human has not been efficient,” explains the researcher. “The moment mutations appear that give human-to-human transmissibility, it could be a new pandemic,” he warns.
The virologist emphasizes that the mutational capacity of the flu virus is “much greater” than that of coronaviruses. “It has the potential to generate a pandemic much worse than the one we are suffering now, but it can happen next month or 100 years from now,” he says. Montoya recalls that his institution, the CSIC, has lost the two main laboratories that investigated the flu virus in Spain, after the retirement of virologists Juan Ortín, in 2016, and Amelia Nieto, in 2020. “To face a possible flu pandemic, we need support for research groups on these issues, which are strategic, ”asserts Montoya.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/two-chinese-experts-who-identified-the-coronavirus-warn-of-the-danger-of-the-h5n8-flu-virus/
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