For seven years before the global pandemic hit, it has been believed that science writer David Quammen foresaw the Covid19 breakout.
After conducting interviews with prominent experts in the fields of epidemiology and virology, his book Spillover, Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, was published in 2012.
And a coronavirus that was released into the environment as a consequence of a wild animal carried into a damp market, he warned, would more likely be the cause of the next pandemic. He was absolutely correct.
But what Quammen is most anxious about is the ‘next big one’ – which may already be spreading faster and farther than scientists understand – and he talks to the Daily Mail about how at some point we will have to face it before it is too late.
Public health specialists also have warned that because the virus flu is spreading uncontrollably on farms, the United States is at risk of another epidemic and one virus in particular that he describes as ‘the most likely of the bird flu is the next pandemic.’
The outbreak has so far affected more than 1,000 herds of dairy cows, 168 million chickens and more than 70 human cases — the first recorded death.
“I have very high concerns about bird flu,” Mr Quammen told this website. If you’re going to make a guess of what our next big one should be now, a scientist would likely tell you that their next big one should be bird flu. “
“However, a lot of randomness goes into this, these viruses have all this high mutation rate, and mutation is a random process.”
But he did say that the variety would be “a very dangerous” virus if the haphazard mutations exposed the H5N1 bird flu virus to the ability to infect humans and spread from one to another.
“With bird flu, that could happen tomorrow,” Mr Quammen, went on. “It just happened with Covid virus; the Covid virus went from being a rare virus to being in humans and in wildlife all over the planet, that could happen with bird flu.”
The H5N1 strain of avian flu was first confirmed in the United States in 2022, and in addition to cats, raccoons, skunks, wild canines and bears, it was also found in dolphins.
Person-to-person transmission has not been proven, and human cases that can be linked to contact with sick animals.
However, although experts negatively warn that mutations and reassortments (when two viruses infect a host at the same time and exchange genetic material) could raise the risk of bird flu to humans, CDC maintain that the risk for humans is low.
Now GVN is every calling on governments worldwide to increase their surveillance and tight its biosecurity measures to counter the threat by H5N1 avian influenza.
Also, the organization warns that nations must be prepared for possible human-to-human dissemination to prevent chaotic series of events similar to the initial stages of the Covid 19 pandemic.
Yet, Mr. Quammen remarked that perhaps a global pandemic will never actually take place because viruses are unpredictable and variable.
But he stressed that to bet on this result is equivalent to betting on a roulette.
Yet, he tells the Daily Mail, “It might take four or five mutations together of just the right combination to do that, and each of those mutations is that highly improbable event.” However, it is an even more improbable event, the combination of the right four or five being so.
He further explained it as the same as roulette. The probability that the roulette ball will drop on your number and color that you bet upon is very small, and even less small that two roulette balls will drop on your two numbers and colors.
But he warned that the odds of the balls landing in the right places by spinning the wheel the right number of times tend to increase.
He also added, “And if you spin the wheel a billion times, it is going to happen.”
So, we are just spinning the wheel billions and billions of times now because this virus is replicating itself by the billions and billions in each individual bird that gets infected – probably every day, Mr Quammen added.
“We have this sense that this virus is replicating itself literally around the world right now millions of wild birds, millions of chickens and a lot of cows and all manner of mammals.”
“Each of those replications, each time you do viral replication in each animal, is a spin of the roulette wheel.”
“Whatever was said during that questioning, I’m not saying it’s a certainty that bird flu is going to be our next pandemic … I’m just saying bird flu is a very, very distinct possibility.”
The first case in the U.S. of swine flu resulting in death was recorded in January in Louisiana, after a patient admitted to hospital with severe respiratory illness died.
The individual was over 65 and had preexisting medical illnesses and had been exposed to dead and ill backyard flock birds, the health officials said.
However, they reported that a genetic analysis of the patient’s infection found that the bird flu virus had mutated inside their body, perhaps leading to a more serious disease, but gave no other details.
Bird flu has been mostly mild, and most cases have occurred in farmworkers who were near sick poultry or even dairy cows, the majority of the 70 cases that have been confirmed in the U.S. since March.
In two cases, California and Missouri health officials have not been able to identify how those people got the virus, but the toddler there and the adult in Missouri are now reported to be recovering.
Additionally, although almost all human cases have occurred from association with infected animals, Mr. Quammen is ‘absolutely’ worried about the effect on public health and food safety since bird flu has been found in milk in American grocers.
Drawing no end to the birds in the world — 34 billion on land — the risk is not just to consumers eating the meat or eggs of the birds, it’s to farm workers handling the diseased birds and catching the virus and in turn spreading it to other people.
According to him, the filthy conditions of factories and meat farms, as well as the huge industrial agriculture, are ‘petri dishes’ for the development of viruses.
“These mass industrial scale animal husbandry operations are dangerous for everybody — not just the people who buy their poultry or their pork from those operations,” Quammen added.
“It’s not to say that we have 8 billion humans on this planet.” The thing is that we have 8billion humans, and so many of them live certain circumstances that allow them to purchase a lot of animal protein.”
Whether it comes from bugs or humans, people are mostly to blame for either bringing about, or staying out of, the next epidemic, Mr. Quammen says.
There are many factors that make viral outbreaks (like SARS and MERS), virus that make people sick, happen such as unhygienic living circumstances, overpopulation, over consumption & climate change.
“It’s not just sheer numbers of the human population that’s causing the problem,” Mr Quammen said. ‘It is population size multiplied by one’s consumption.’
“And that’s causing two things. That’s causing disruption of wild ecosystems where a lot of these viruses live in wild animals minding their own business, and as we disrupt those ecosystems we give those viruses an opportunity to get into us and spill into humans.”
“That is an opportunity like winning the sweepstakes for the [viruses], especially because it opens up an extremely successful global virus.”
Mr. Quammen is more concerned about ‘factory scale’ production of animals for human food.
“We are also producing animal protein, domestic animals in a factory way at high concentrations of where you have hundreds of thousands of pigs, millions of chickens all harbour together in one building or one farm,” he said.
He stressed that measures to prevent a climate change pandemic might include stricter climate change measures and a less meat heavy diet.
He said to ‘think twice’ about ‘how much animal protein you buy, where you buy it.’
He also urging people to ‘think twice about having children and then then think twice about how many children you have and how much you add to the human population on this planet.’