I keep hearing I should get a flu shot to help prevent bird flu — but I thought flu shots only prevented illness from the particular strains the shot was designed for. Does getting a traditional flu shot do anything to prevent bird flu transmission?
I keep hearing I should get a flu shot to help prevent bird flu — but I thought flu shots only prevented illness from the particular strains the shot was designed for. Does getting a traditional flu shot do anything to prevent bird flu transmission?
The current flu shot is almost certainly not effective against the current HPAI A(H5N1) strain that is in the news and making life hard for dairy and poultry farms. There likely won’t be a vaccine developed for it unless it mutates to become human-to-human transmissible. Currently, people can only contract it from exposure to sick animals or their environment. As long as you avoid contact with sick birds or cattle (or their bodily fluids or feces) you should be safe from contracting it… unless it mutates.
There are vaccines in development already, but mass production is a complete different issue.
There are already lots of H5N1 vaccines for both animals and humans, and the US, for example, has stockpiles of millions. But if at some point the virus mutates to be able to circulate among humans (which it has not), existing vaccines would almost certainly not provide protection against that new virus. Since there is no virus like that yet, there is no vaccine for it yet, but pharmaceutical companies have been creating flu vaccines for many decades and would probably be able to create one and scale it up quickly
Thank you. I was unaware that anyone was working on a new vaccine.
It has also killed at least one cat who had eaten infected chicken:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/oregon-avian-flu-cat-death-prompts-nationwide-raw-pet-food-recall
It’s a whole different and horrific issue for cats. It’s also killed at least two whose owners them raw milk. It’s apparently about 67% lethal for cats.