Until recently, every human case of avian flu this year involved people who came in contact with infected poultry or cows.
But since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced this month that a person in Missouri who contracted bird flu had no known contact with infected animals, health researchers are concerned about the possibility of human-to-human transmission.
“If it is human transmission of H5N1, that automatically raises the threat level,” says Samuel Scarpino, director of AI + life sciences at Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI.
“Once you start to have ongoing human-to-human transmission, you now have a selective advantage for mutations that arise that increase the chance of infecting more people,” Scarpino says.
“So the concern is that you start to create the evolutionary environment for an epidemic,” he says.
