This Avian 'Flu Just Flies By

It's amazing how things change. The last time avian flu hit the UK, there was real panic about its ability to, not only decimate wild and domesticated bird stocks, but its potential to infect human populations. If I remember rightly, stocks of antiferon drugs (these reduce the ability of viruses to spread to neighbouring cells) were expensively acquired. They were eventually little-used and only have a short shelflife. We now have another full-blown outbreak of the H5N8 strain. It is killing wild birds (like swans, buzzards, geese and curlews) and infecting farmed chickens in Cheshire, Herefordshire, Kent and Leicestershire. This has resulted in the setting up of a biosecurity zone across England, Scotland and Wales (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/avian-influenza-bird-flu-national-prevention-zone-declared). This strain seems to pose little danger to humans but, it could well be, that smaller wild bird species are dying in numbers (they are simply less obvious, when infected, than birds like swans and geese). Avian 'flu is also, in the current times, much less newsworthy than Covid-19, so it hardly gets a mention. Bird 'flut does, however, have parallels that are not a million miles from the 'human' virus on which all of our attention is focused.