In an interview with Fox News this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed a novel fix to the nation’s bird flu epidemic: Let the virus spread.
“They should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flocks so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” Kennedy said of poultry farmers and federal authorities.
It is the nation’s agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, who has authority over the nation’s poultry management, not Kennedy. But Rollins appears to be in agreement with her counterpart at HHS. As The New York Times noted, she floated the idea of a pilot program that would allow the disease to ravage a flock, while extra layers of protection contained the spread within a certain perimeter. The surviving birds could then be studied.
But there are reasons that scientists recommend immediately culling infected flocks, and letting the virus run rampant could have dire consequences.
The bird flu, H5N1, has a near 100% fatality rate in chickens and turkeys, and has already killed millions of wild birds.
One of the ways it can spread to healthy poultry farms is by a single infected duck visiting a flock and shedding the virus through feces. H5N1 kills relatively quickly, causing respiratory distress, swelling, lack of coordination and other symptoms before death. (Culling is therefore considered more humane.)
The virus has cropped up on farms and in backyard flocks around the country, resulting in some 166 million birds culled so far — resulting in the alarmingly high egg prices seen around the country.
Although not common, humans can become infected with H5N1, and one person in the U.S. has died of the infection. Most of the human cases so far have been seen in those who have had prolonged contact with infected birds or dairy cows. There has been no human-to-human transmission observed in the United States so far.
But that could change. As with other viruses, mass spread gives H5N1 the chance to mutate as it multiplies, running the risk of a mutation that allows the virus to spread easily from human to human. Experts are already alarmed at the fact that the virus has jumped from birds to dairy cows, as it represents a leap between different species.
The mortality rate in humans is estimated to be around 50%.
Emily Hilliard, the HHS deputy press secretary, told The New York Times that Kennedy was merely trying to say that “culling puts people at the highest risk of exposure” due to the close contact it requires, which is why the secretary and National Institutes for Health “want to limit culling activities.”
“Culling is not the solution. Strong biosecurity is,” Hilliard said.
Allowing the virus to proliferate, however, would still risk a mutation that could make H5N1 a bigger threat to humans.
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Brooke Rollins, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Health and Human Services
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