July 2, 2025—What happens if bird flu becomes the next pandemic? Plus, China may beat the U.S. in bringing back samples from Mars, and how to curb summer learning loss in kids.
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor |
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China’s first Mars rover, Zhurong, with its Tianwen-1 landing platform, which touched down on the Red Planet in May 2021. The mission’s success aided China’s development of the more ambitious Tianwen-3, which is a Mars-bound sample-return mission slated to launch in 2028. Xinhua/Alamy Stock Photo |
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This week, we’re doing a deep dive on bird flu. Today is part three of a three-part series. |
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Scientists at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio create vaccine seeds with fertilized chicken eggs. Jeffery DelViscio/Scientific American |
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What If Bird Flu Causes a Pandemic?
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Historically, H5N1 viruses (which cause bird flu) have been deadly, killing nearly 50 percent of the people they’ve infected, according to the World Health Organization. As the viruses circulate in birds and mammals (like cows) they have a greater chance of mutating into forms that can easily spread among and kill people. What can be done if bird flu does start jumping between humans?Biomedical answers: In highly secure labs, scientists handle some of the world’s potentially deadliest viruses. Naeem Amarsy, a journalist reporting for Scientific American, traveled to the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, where scientists are building attenuated forms of H5N1 that can potentially be used to make vaccines. To do so, researchers infect fertilized chicken eggs from biosecure farms across the country. Flu viruses grow very well in the egg’s allantoic cavity, which is full of a liquid that contains waste from the embryo as well as various proteins. Viruses grown this way are called vaccine seeds, and they serve as a kind of "prototype" that could be used to mass-produce a vaccine. Meanwhile, the federal government announced in May it was canceling a contract with Moderna to develop an mRNA vaccine against bird flu. |
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From left: Ramya Smithaveni Barre and Ahmed Elsayed of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute put on personal protective equipment before entering a BSL-3, or biosafety level three, laboratory. Naeem Amarsy/Scientific American |
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What the experts say: From the beginning of the current outbreak to early June 2025 there have been 70 known human cases of H5N1 in the United States. Most cases have been mild, but experts worry we may be undercounting them—by a lot. “We know that our known cases are a relatively small proportion of total actual cases, especially because the disease has been so mild in most of the farmworkers who have become infected,” says Tufts epidemiologist Shira Doron. “Most people with very mild infections don’t go to the doctor and don’t request testing.” If many cases go undetected, it means that H5N1 could be spreading silently. And every time it infects a new person it gets a chance to mutate, possibly into a form that adapts better to human bodies. In order to stay ahead of the curve, state and federal agencies need to ramp up our monitoring efforts, from testing for possible infections to conducting wastewater surveillance, says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University. Click here to learn more about how we could respond to a future H5N1 pandemic. |
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What do you want to know about bird flu? Send us your questions and we'll publish the answers to some in a future issue of Today in Science. |
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