Health Commissioner: “Climate change” and “globalization” will lead to new animal-to-human viruses

By Michael Bielawski

Vermont’s Health Commissioner Mark Levine told lawmakers while discussing the H5 bird flu virus that new animal-to-human viruses could become more commonplace.

“That is sort of what our future is going to look like,” Levine told the House Health Care and Agricultural committees on Tuesday. “Some of it related to climate change, some of it related to globalization, the way people interact with their environment, the proximity of humans and animals. … Lots of explanations but this is really the way things are going to go into the future.”

He was describing what’s called “zoonosis”. Levine said its definition “is an infection that’s normally seen in the animal world, but jumps to the human world.”

Regarding the latest H5 bird flu, Levine suggested Vermont livestock is being impacted. It is also impacting birds domestic and wild.

“But that’s why as a public health official, I’m way more concerned about the birds because it’s the wild birds that are the ones that are incubating this virus all the time and letting it mutate and bringing it to [the farm] when they die, etc,” Levine said.

He said that domesticated and wild animals can spread it to one another.

“And they brought it to several of these barnyard flocks, because it was quite clear that, potentially, there was a pond that both sets of birds were using and interacting with one another,” he said.

First human casualty

The first H5 bird flu death had been recorded in Louisiana. The Louisiana Department of Health reports “The patient who had been hospitalized with the first human case of highly pathogenic avian influenza [HPAI], or H5N1, in Louisiana and the U.S., has died. The patient was over the age of 65 and was reported to have underlying medical conditions.

It continues that the patient contracted the virus after being exposed to “a combination of a non-commercial backyard flock and wild birds.”

Levine touched upon the situation.

“What we have seen in the Louisiana patient illustrated this is the virus that entered that person’s body was different in terms of its genotype than the virus that had at the time of death,” he said.

He further said that there had been some mutations of the virus which is not unexpected. He reiterated that changes in the virus must be monitored closely to prevent worse scenarios.

Fox News in Las Vegas is reporting that there has been a farm worker who was infected. Initial reports are the man is OK.

“The worker’s illness is mild similar to pink eye with eye redness and irritation. CDC officials say there is no evidence the virus has spread from the infected farm worker to any other person. The agency continues to say the virus poses a low risk to the general public.”

“public health risk is low”

According to the CDC, on a global scale, H5 bird flu “is widespread in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows with several recent human cases in U.S. dairy and poultry workers.”

It further states, “While the current public health risk is low, CDC is watching the situation carefully and working with states to monitor people with animal exposures.”

Emergency drill

Meanwhile, the state has taken the initiative of roleplaying a hypothetical outbreak scenario to test local and state health services in how they would respond to an outbreak.

Levine said, “So we had the state agencies, we had farmers, we had community partners, we had hospitals and health care partners, and basically the problem was a hypothetical outbreak on a farm in Franklin County.”

He said it allowed them to see what they have and what they need.

“And we had people around tables and all getting into great discussions and figuring out what they actually had now as resources, what resources they didn’t have at all and would need to have, and how to work well together with each other so we minimize the impact of any such kind of incidents,” Levine said.

More vaccines?

Levine suggested that folks should keep taking vaccinations, especially older populations.

“And we’ve seen that just with COVID experience which is why we’re always so hyper about older people and immunocompromised or chronically ill people getting vaccinated so that doesn’t happen in that,” he said.

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The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle