Dr Brinkley Bellotti was recently interviewed by the MIT Technology Review on the topic of H5N1 and its continued spread in dairy cows and poultry. In her interview, Dr Bellotti mentions that unmitigated spread of H5N1 in animals could lead to recombination events of the influenza virus which could allow for strains that could more easily infect humans.
Members of the Section on Infectious Diseases including the Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Applied Statistics Group (IDEAS) and their collaborators are working on a number of projects to help understand the spread of H5N1 and its impact on animal and human health and have published several preprints on the topic.
In the first preprint, they provide the first estimates of the basic reproduction number (R0) and other epidemiologic parameters for H5N1 in dairy cows and show that the virus can spread rapidly within herds1. As part of this work, they developed a web application that allows users to simulate the spread of H5N1 in dairy herd.
In the second preprint, IDEAS members Michael DeWitt and Brinkley Bellotti along with Wake Forest University Biology Professor Nicholas Kortessis show that the time farms have to mobilize interventions is extremely limited, with outbreaks often being essential over by the time of detection2. These findings have important implications for the design of effective surveillance and intervention strategies to control the spread of H5N1, suggesting that sensitive and frequent testing is likely needed to stop on-farm outbreaks and institute effective control measures to prevent farm to farm spread.
link photo credit: Cynthia Goldsmith/ Jackie Katz
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@online{dewitt2024,
author = {DeWitt, Michael},
title = {In the News: {Wake} {Forest} Faculty Discusses {H5N1} and
Ongoing Research},
date = {2024-12-10},
url = {https://wakeforestid.com/posts/2024-12-10-h5n1-updates/},
langid = {en}
}