A rare case of avian influenza infecting a human living in England was reported this week. Bird-to-human transmission is rare and human-to-human rarer still, but with UK outbreaks now doubling last year’s figures and predictions of Europe’s worst bird flu epidemic ever - coupled with the high mutation rate of influenza and cases of H5N1 detected in foxes, seals and other mammals - a human bird flu pandemic feels closer than ever.

The Guardian yesterday reported on a rare case of bird flu being found in a human living in the south-west of England. Before you panic, unless you spend a lot of time in very close proximity to large numbers of infected birds - as was the situation with 79-year-old Alan Gosling, as named today - most of us have little to be concerned about right now. That is until the virus mutates sufficiently, which influenza does better than most other viruses.

Gosling reportedly kept 20 Muscovy ducks inside his home and a further 100 outside over a long period, which it’s safe to say relatively few of us do. The story is one of tragedy as all the ducks - whom Gosling’s daughter Ellesha said “were like his closest friends” - all had to be killed despite his emotional pleas.

This may seem like an isolated incident, and indeed it is a first for the UK, but what about other people who work with susceptible bird species - specifically the workers and processors at intensive poultry farms? All would seem at higher risk of catching bird flu due to the sheer numbers of chickens and other farmed birds, plus prolonged exposure, and all it would take is the right mutation to spark the next global pandemic many times more deadly than Covid-19. Speaking to Surge co-founder Ed Winters last year, Dr Michael Greger - physician and bestselling author of How not to Die and How to Survive a Pandemic - said Covid was “just a dress rehearsal”:

“The last time a bird flu jumped species and spread easily from human to human, it triggered the deadliest plague in history, the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million people,” said Dr Greger writing for Surge. “Evidence now suggests that all pandemic influenza viruses - in fact, all human and mammalian flu viruses in general - owe their origins to avian influenza, and we now have bird flu viruses like H5N1 and H7N9 poised to kill millions.”

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Professor Isabel Oliver, chief scientific officer at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), keeping a cooler tone to prevent public panic, told the Guardian: “Currently there is no evidence that this strain detected in the UK can spread from person to person, but we know that viruses evolve all the time and we continue to monitor the situation closely.”

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Consider also that the number of bird flu outbreaks in the UK is the “most extensive ever” according to industry press outlet Poultry World, exceeding 50 cases in December and 70 this month, compared to around 30 this time last year. That may not sound like a lot but as a consequence, more than a million birds have been destroyed to control the spread, despite the enforcement of bird flu lockdown measures (Avian Influenza Prevention Zones) for poultry farmers and small-scale bird caregivers. We might be worried for our own safety, but the cost to birds and other non-human animals is already staggering.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) reported that avian influenza had already killed more than 850 barnacle geese at its Mersehead reserve with 3,000-4,000 wild birds in total succumbing to the disease. RSPB area manager Andrew Bielinski told Poultry World that it was “unprecedented” and “likely to get worse”.

“I have worked in the area for 25 years and I don’t ever remember us seeing this many birds dying,” he said. “A more detailed look at the genetic make-up of these viruses shows that they are different to those from previous years. This is predicted to be as a result of the virus infecting multiple birds across a range of species, and this provides the perfect opportunity for the virus to evolve.”

Evolve, in this context, could mean a mutation that makes it more transmissible among birds, or an evolution arising from genetic recombination. Flu viruses of different subtypes and strains can share genetic material if they infect a single host in parallel. Pigs, for example, are considered an excellent melting pot due to their susceptibility to human, pig and bird flu viruses.

Last month, UK environment secretary, George Eustice, head of Defra, announced a record year for cases of bird flu associated with wild birds migrating from Asia and spreading the virus via their faeces. The rest of Europe is also facing its largest bird flu epidemic, where it has also been detected in mammals: H5N1 in foxes in the Netherlands, H5N8 in seals in Germany and Sweden, and in otters in Finland.

With cases of bird flu reaching record numbers in the UK and across Europe, and worrying examples of strains infecting non-bird species only adding to the ways in which avian influenza can spread between areas, why do we still have places where tens of thousands of birds are kept crammed together in sheds with unsanitary conditions? Factory farming has already been identified as a likely source of new types of antibiotic-resistant bacteria tough enough to defeat our last line of defence medicines, and it has long been suspected that the 1918 influenza pandemic originated on a farm.

Chickens and other farmed bird species are already being culled to prevent the spread of bird flu, and if cases year-on-year keep increasing the way they have and doubts about the safety of introducing bird flu vaccines into the human food supply and their long-term efficacy as new strains emerge, a way to exit poultry farming for good must be found.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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