Right now, California is the epicenter of the outbreak, with 34 cases of bird flu in humans in that state alone, mostly after exposure to cows.

Can you die from bird flu?

It is possible to die from bird flu. In the past, human infection was likely severe—more than 50 percent of the nearly 1,000 people infected with bird flu from the 1990s to 2020 died.

However, more recent bird flu cases have generally been mild, with only one in 61 cases in the US experiencing severe symptoms requiring hospitalization.

How dangerous is bird flu?

Most people who have recently contracted bird flu have experienced only mild symptoms such as pink eyes, cough, fever, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, muscle aches, fatigue and headaches – similar to the common flu.

However, bird flu can also cause diarrhea, nausea and vomiting, and in severe cases, respiratory problems, convulsions, pneumonia and death.

Bird flu primarily attacks animals. It was originally contagious among avian populations and rarely caused spillover infections to other species such as humans.

“In 2020, there was a variant of this strain – referred to as 2.3.4.4b – that spread particularly well,” Hutchinson said. “In the US, it has fully adapted to cattle and established itself as a new cow pathogen.”

The vast majority of bird flu cases confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been linked to exposure to infected animals such as chickens and cows.

So far, there has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission, meaning no one person has given bird flu to another person, so the risk to the general public is still considered low, according to the CDC.

Will bird flu become a pandemic?

The risk of a bird flu pandemic depends on whether the virus remains primarily an animal disease with occasional spillover infections or mutates into a human disease.

Hutchinson said: “When an influenza virus from another animal adapts to spread efficiently between humans, the result is a pandemic.

“There’s no indication at this point that that’s going to happen with H5N1, and we really don’t know enough about this new strain of H5N1 to say with any certainty how likely that jump is to happen.

“But the more encounters the virus has with humans, the greater the chance it will adapt to grow in them, and if it can mix and match its genes with human seasonal flu, it could speed up that process.”