This will be worse than Covid.

The bird flu has proven scary enough with its occasional spreads from birds to mammals of all sorts, but the study published in Eurosurveillance calls the latest devastation of mink sicknesses and deaths especially concerning. “Our findings also indicate that an onward transmission of the virus to other minks may have taken place in the affected farm,” the study authors write.

That raises the alarm that humans could be next. “This outbreak signals the very real potential for the emergence of mammal-to-mammal transmission,” Michelle Wille, a University of Sydney researcher, tells CBC News.

“It could have deadly consequences,” Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialists, tells CBC News. “This is an infection that has epidemic and pandemic potential. I don’t know if people recognize how big a deal this is.”

Well, that’s comforting.

The H5N1 avian influenza is notorious for a near 100-percent mortality rate in birds. While mammals aren’t catching the virus at the same rate as birds, they aren’t immune to the effects: bird flu has a global WHO mortality rate of greater than 50 percent for humans.

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