Looking back five years later, we might ask what did the COVID-19 pandemic teach us? I was recently asked this question during an interview with St. Louis On the Air at St. Louis Public Radio https://www.stlpr.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2025-03-25/bird-flu-should-be-on-all-our-minds-says-st-louis-zoo-epidemiologist.
I had been invited back to the show by a producer who remembered our conversation On Air in early 2020 https://www.stlpr.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2020-01-29/how-the-st-louis-zoo-is-helping-humans-by-helping-animals. You remember early 2020 in the B.C. times – Before COVID? That 2020 interview was 42 days before our town went into lock down. During the interview, I said that this little-known coronavirus (COVID-19) should be on all of our minds. It is possible that during that 20-minute lunch time radio program on January 29, 2020, the majority of people listening may have been thinking that the wildlife veterinarian was overly concerned.
But now 5 years later and with the COVID pandemic officially declared over in May 2023, I was invited back to talk about pandemics and One Health. You may ask, why now? Most likely it is because of the latest virus in the news. This current zoonoses, with outbreaks globally and with pandemic potential, should be on all of our minds. I am talking about H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza. You may be more familiar with its other name, bird flu.
Bird flu has been around a long time, first described in the late 1800s, and known to be a concern for domestic poultry production. The biology of avian influenza viruses is fascinating, and well worth reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_influenza.
So why do I think the latest avian influenza subtype, H5N1, should be on all our minds? Could it be the tens of thousands of marine birds and mammals that have died from this virus https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/07/g-s1-46402/bird-flu-wild-animals-mammals-virus? Or maybe it is because of the 100s of millions of domestic birds that have been culled because of the virus https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-26/poultry-culling-hasnt-stopped-h5n1-bird-flu? Or maybe it is the add-on costs of the outbreak as evident by the price of eggs https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/us-egg-prices-see-largest-jump-1980-bird-flu-outbreaks-continue? Or maybe, just maybe, it is that we know H5N1 can infect humans, has caused human deaths, and if it mutates so that it can spread human to human https://www.cdc.gov/cfa-qualitative-assessments/php/data-research/h5-risk-assessment.html, we should be ready for the next pandemic.
It seems to me that the old adage, prevention is better than the cure fits perfectly with how we should be thinking about H5N1 and other zoonoses with pandemic potential. It just makes sense to prevent a pandemic rather than to treat it after the virus is out of the barn. Data support this adage when we consider the cost of COVID-19 recorded in the millions of human lives lost, livelihoods changed, long COVID health concerns https://sph.cuny.edu/life-at-sph/news/2025/03/19/long-covid-cost/, and trillions of dollars lost in the global economy https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10870589/.
What do you think we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic? As you may know, the debate and finger pointing continues. I think we learned a lot, but also possibly nothing at all. How we respond right now—today—to the H5N1 bird flu with its pandemic potential may be the key to answering whether we learned a lot, or possibly nothing at all.
