To prepare for future outbreaks, we’ll have to decide which is the greater danger: nature or ourselves.
After three bleak years, the coronavirus pandemic is finally drawing to a close, but pandemics as a general threat very much are not. At the moment, the most pressing concern is H5N1, better known as bird flu. Public-health experts have worried for decades about the virus’s potential to spark a pandemic, and the current strain has been devastating global bird populations—not to mention spilling over into assorted mammalian hosts—for more than a year. But those worries became even more urgent in mid-October, when an outbreak of the virus on a Spanish mink farm seemed to show that the mink were not only contracting the disease but transmitting it.
Occasional spillover from birds to mammals is one thing; transmission among mammals—especially those whose respiratory tracts resemble humans’ as closely as mink’s do—is another. “I’m actually quite concerned about it,” Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, told me. “The situation we’re in with H5 now, we have not been in before, in terms of how widespread it is, in terms of the different hosts it’s infecting.”
