While cattle have notably been contaminated by the H5N1 strain in the United States in recent weeks, the virus has not yet been detected in pig farms.
Last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) expressed “great concern” about the spread of the H5N1 strain of avian flu to new species. At the beginning of April, in the United States, a farmer in Texas was contaminated by one of his dairy cows.
According to immunologist Brigitte Autran, president of Covars (Committee for Monitoring and Anticipation of Health Risks), one animal in particular must be closely monitored: the pig.
“What is really worrying, and what can promote a human epidemic, is the passage of the virus currently present in birds and now in cows, to pigs,” she explained to Europe 1 this Friday, May 10. “The real risk is really the pork.”
A risk of “recombination”
According to the president of Covars, there may be in pork or pigs “several influenza viruses present at the same time which will produce what we call in our jargon a ‘recombination'” capable of causing a “modification of the virus which could become highly transmissible to humans.”
Nevertheless, Brigitte Autran insists on a reassuring fact: “There is no human-to-human transmission to date, and there has not been any in the 20 years that we have known about this virus.”
According to WHO figures, the H5N1 virus has demonstrated “an extraordinarily high mortality rate” among people contaminated by contact with infected animals.
Between the start of 2023 and April 1, 2024, the WHO said it recorded a total of 889 human cases of avian flu in 23 countries, including 463 deaths. That is to say a fatality rate greater than 50%.
