Bird flu outbreak proves we're still 'just flying blind'

Four years into COVID, experts fear we are no better at detecting viruses

- PATTY WINSA

Biologist Michael Worobey and other disease experts around the world say governments have been too slow to respond to a very real risk of bird flu developing into a global pandemic.

Michael Worobey knows where lightning can strike.

That's because long before he was an evolutionary biologist tracking down the origins of viruses such as HIV and SARS-CoV-2, he was a firefighter in B.C., lowered by helicopter to look for forest fires after lightning strikes - chase the lightning, and you can find the fires before they get out of control.

But four years into COVID, and with bird flu spreading largely undetected in U.S. dairy cattle for months now, he says he's appalled governments aren't doing similar surveillance for potential pandemic viruses.

"We know that forest fires are going to happen. And so we make that investment," said Worobey, a Canadian who is a professor and department head of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.

But with the biological version of a forest fire, "where these viruses can spread like wildfire through animals and people - we're still basically just flying blind," said Worobey. And the result, he said, is now "a raging conflagration that is already spread across most of the United States."

Around the world this year, disease experts like Worobey are focused on the threat of highly pathogenic avian influenza, or bird flu. The H5N1 virus, which has long been singled out for its potential as a threat to humans, may never develop into a global pandemic on the scale of COVID but, the experts say, governments have so far been too slow to respond to a very real risk.

And even if the next globe-sweeping pathogen is not bird flu, they say, a key lesson of COVID is that the best time to fight a forest fire is before it takes off.

Bird flu in the U.S.