Would Connecticut be ready for an avian flu pandemic?

CT Insider – Thursday, March 13, 2025
By Jordan Nathaniel Fenster

There’s been an ongoing outbreak of avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, since 2022. It’s not yet considered a pandemic but it could very easily become one, experts say, and the United States may not be ready to handle it.

The tipping point will be human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 virus, according to Anice Lowen, professor of microbiology and immunology and influenza specialist at Emory University in Georgia.

“The virus is not transmitting between humans, and that’s a very good thing,” she said. “That is the change that would lead to a pandemic.”

Avian flu is not new. There have been outbreaks seen in bird populations since 1959, and in humans since 1997. This latest outbreak of H5N1, the virus that causes avian influenza, has been detected in 166 million birds since 2022 in every state, including Connecticut.

Most of those infections have been seen in wild bird populations, with two known instances of backyard poultry flocks catching the virus in Connecticut. There have been no instances yet of commercial poultry flocks catching the virus in Connecticut, though there have been in other states.

So far, there have been no confirmed human cases in Connecticut, and a total of 70 nationwide, including one death from the disease in Louisiana. “The patient contracted H5N1 after exposure to a combination of a non-commercial backyard flock and wild birds,” that state’s department of health said in a January news release.

New ways of transmission

The difference with this outbreak, Lowen said, is that the virus is acting in new ways. This is the first time, for example, that H5N1 has been seen in dairy cattle, and farm workers have caught it from their herds.

“The outbreak has created a new human animal interface for H5N1,” Lowen said. “The virus is now widespread in American dairy cattle leading to extensive exposure of dairy workers through milk, and that’s new. It’s only been an issue for about one year.”

Pasteurized milk is heated extensively to kill the virus, but farm workers may be sprayed with or otherwise exposed to raw milk, resulting in an infection.

“There’s lots of virus in the milk, and milking does create a lot of spray and spillage in the dairy parlors,” Lowen said. “The cases that have been identified almost all have symptoms in the eyes, conjunctivitis, and so it seems likely that milk spraying directly into the workers’ faces led to those infections.”

There has been a vaccine developed and it and “they can ramp up if they need,” said Scott Roberts, an infectious disease specialist at Yale-New Haven Hospital. But farmers may not be keen to vaccinate or even report infection in their flocks, and Americans may be similarly disinclined to get vaccinated.

“We could vaccinate these chickens, but then you can’t export them, and no other country would buy a vaccinated chicken. So farmers have very little incentive to report positive flocks. They don’t have incentive to vaccinate chickens,” Roberts said. “The more opportunity you give this to run rampant in these animal populations, the higher the likelihood it’s going to find a human who’s co-infected with H5N1, and lead to some viral reassortment that can spread human to human, and that’s kind of the existential fear.”

Both Roberts and Ulysses Wu, head of infection prevention at Hartford HealthCare, noted that people are less likely to wear masks to protect themselves.

“It takes only that slight little mutation to make that jump from animal or bird to human, and then from human to human,” Wu said. “That’s how it all starts.”

Influenza viruses have been studied for decades, more than a century now, which Lowen said, should the need arise, would be beneficial to a widespread response.

“We have prototype vaccines stockpiled, they would need to be expanded, produced in large quantities, to be rolled out for public use,” she said. “The technology is in place and the method is in place, and the infrastructure is there. I think we are in some ways better prepared for an influenza pandemic than we were for the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Roberts, though, noted that funding for federal public health agencies have been put in question at the highest levels. A proposed budget from the U.S. House of Representatives would cut $1.5 billion from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and $1.6 billion from the CDC.

“We’re not in good shape from a public health standpoint, with reduction in funding and scrutiny, and the vaccine hesitancy movement,” he said. “If it did become a pandemic, how would we respond from a public health perspective? I don’t think we would do well.”

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