Bird flu could jump to humans any day

There is mammal-to-mammal transmission H5N1 bird flu virus in the United States of America.Scientists are worried the virus could mutate to spread between humans.

Former surgeon general Jerome Adams fears the United States of America. is making the mistakes of 2020 all over again.

The cow-to-cow transmission is the latest escalation in a global outbreak that began when the virus reemerged in Europe in 2020. It has since killed tens of millions of birds and more than 40,000 sea lions and seals in South America. The World Health Organization chief scientist Jeremy Farrar called this an "animal pandemic" on April 18.

In recent months  Bird flu is flying wild, the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus has been spreading through United States of America cattle herds for the first time ever.

Genetic fragments of the virus, discovered in grocery store milk shows that the cattle outbreak is more widespread than officials believed, The Washington Post reported.

Some Experts advised that drinking pasteurized milk is probably still safe. Pasteurization deactivates pathogens, probably including H5N1, according to the Food and Drug Administration. 

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, the FDA is testing whether pasteurizing milk deactivates H5N1. But before now, no studies have specifically tested that.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, One human in Texas has tested positive for the virus after exposure to dairy cattle.  that person's only symptom was eye redness.

There has been no known human-to-human transmission. Still, future mutation could allow the virus to spread more easily to and between humans — a possibility of "great concern" to Farrar.

"If it keeps spreading in animals, then it is eventually going to cause problems for humans, either because we don't have food because they've got to start exterminating flocks, or because it starts to make a jump in humans," Adams, who served under former President Donald Trump and was on the administration's initial COVID-19 task force, told Business Insider. "The more it replicates, the more chances it has to mutate."

Though he agrees with the CDC's assessment that the current risk to humans is low, Adams fears the United States of America is repeating many mistakes it made in the early days of COVID-19.