Bird flu is rampant in animals. Humans ignore it at our own peril

If H5N1 bird flu changes at the right place at the right time, suddenly the animal pandemic could become a major problem for people, too.

Mark Naniot remembers 2022 as the summer from hell. As the co-founder of Wild Instincts animal rescue in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, Naniot and his team spent the season sweating in gloves, gowns, smocks and masks and going through what felt like endless rounds of disinfection as they moved between the cages of the sick and injured animals they cared for. The precautions were necessary for a trio of infectious diseases occurring with some frequency in wild animals that summer: Covid-19 was still making life difficult, and a devastating contagion called chronic wasting disease was showing up in deer in the area. Then, there was H5N1 bird flu to contend with. “It’s highly, highly transmissible,” said Naniot, who has been involved in animal rescue for 35 years. Since it was first discovered in birds in 1996, H5N1 has shown itself to be a Swiss Army Knife of a virus, evolving the necessary tools to break into the cells of a growing list of species. So far, it has infected and killed millions of wild and farmed birds. It’s also been found in at least 26 different kinds of mammals, including, most recently in the United States — cows, cats and house mice. The voraciousness of the virus added link prompted Dr. Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist of the World Health Organization in April to call it “a global zoonotic animal pandemic.”