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This week, we hit an unfortunate new milestone in the bird flu outbreak: the first confirmed case of H5N1 in pigs. This isn’t good, but it is far from the worst-case scenario. This was not a commercial farm, so they only had five pigs, who were housed near poultry. All the pigs have since been euthanized and studied. The virus is genetically related to the one circulating in wild birds, not the one in dairy cows, which is a good thing because it would need to make a bigger leap to mutate into something that can spread from pig to pig and eventually human to human. The concern with pigs is that they’re mixing vessels because they can get both avian and human flus and if they get both at the same time, the viruses might mix in a process called reassortment. In the 2009 swine flu H1N1 pandemic, this gene swapping happened in a pig with a bird and human virus to kick off the outbreak. Right now, though, the risk is still very low. We’re not seeing any evidence that this is making the genetic leaps to spread from human to human, and we don’t think the risk is significantly higher, even if there are some sporadic bird-to-pig transmission cases. What we want to keep an eye on is any pig-to-pig spread, which would drastically raise the pandemic risk by creating lots of opportunities for mixing. But for now, we’re very lucky and still think that the overall risk of a human H5N1 pandemic is low.
Sources: STAT, CIDRAP, Scientific American
Not necessarily. Flu season usually starts around mid-October, so it’s a little later than usual, but nothing too far out of the ordinary right now. When flu season starts later, it doesn’t usually get any shorter, so it stretches further into the spring. A better indicator of what to expect is the severity of flu season in the Southern hemisphere, which was about average this year, though it’s not a perfect model (for example, theirs started a bit early this year, not slightly late, like ours). This season’s flu vaccine reduced the risk of hospitalization for flu by about 35% in the Southern hemisphere. That’s not amazing - it was 50% last year - but it’s also nothing to sneeze at. If you haven’t gotten your flu shot yet, get it this week. Now is the perfect time because it takes a few weeks to build up your immunity, and we expect that we’ll start to see flu numbers ticking up in the next week or two.
Source: CDC
It's not just in your head. There are lots of recalls happening right now: