Doc warns we’re making “same mistakes” as 2020 with bird flu

This doctor has something to squawk about.

A former surgeon general is sounding the alarm that the current situation with bird flu feels like 2020 all over again — and warned that the virus could jump to humans any day now.

Dr. Jerome Adams, who served under former President Donald Trump, said that one way or another, the virus will soon start to cause serious problems.

“If it keeps spreading in animals, then it is eventually going to cause problems for humans, either because we don’t have food because they’ve got to start exterminating flocks, or because it starts to make a jump in humans,” Adams, now the director of health equity at Purdue University, told Business Insider. “The more it replicates, the more chances it has to mutate.”

About one in five — or 20% — of commercial milk samples contain remnants of bird flu, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Thursday. The results suggest that the virus is actually far more widespread in cattle than thought. Officially, only 33 herds in eight states have been infected.

Experts say there is still no cause for concern, and that you can continue to buy and drink milk, because the pasteurization process kills the virus.

Adams said he is still buying milk and hasn’t changed his dietary habits, since properly cooking eggs should also kill the virus. But the doctor stressed he’s concerned not everyone is getting the message.

“The public needs good consistent communication from the White House, from the USDA, helping reassure them what the process is to keep them safe,” Adams said.

The former surgeon general went on to say that he fears we’re repeating many of the early mistakes of COVID-19, when people distrusted a vaccine process that was unclear.

Adams also expressed concern that the cattle outbreak could be wider than thought — since farmers are only testing cattle once they appear sick. That means asymptomatic cows could be spreading the virus without anyone knowing.

“An animal can’t tell you, ‘Hey, I feel a little under the weather today.’ So they’re literally waiting until an animal is collapsing or showing fatigue or showing severe symptoms,” Adams explained to Business Insider. “We need a testing strategy that is proactive and allows true surveillance, and not reactive.”

On Wednesday, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) also announced that dairy cows needed to be tested for H5N1 (bird flu) before being moved across state lines and that positive results needed to be reported. Until now, the USDA had not actually been tracking positive test results in cattle, the New York Times reported.

“My concern is we keep making the same mistakes over and over again,” Adams said. “Because we keep focusing on the wrong things instead of focusing on the root causes.”

Those root causes, Adams noted, include public health as a priority — rather than focusing on potential profit losses.

When birds and cattle are infected with avian flu, they’re culled. And even before killing the animals to curb the disease, just testing livestock can slow down production. All of that means that global food prices could soon be rising for the average consumer.

“We’re seeing the same tension between business interests and public health interests,” Adams said, referring to the business lockdowns that occurred during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

The former surgeon general is hardly the only one who is concerned. Last week Dr. Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the World Health Organization, expressed “great concern” about the rising number of global bird flu cases and emphasized that worldwide, the disease has had an “extremely high” mortality rate.

“The great concern, of course, is that … [the] virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans. And then critically, the ability to go from human-to-human transmission,” Farrar warned.

For now, just two humans in the US have been infected with the virus, both of whom were in close contact with infected livestock. The virus has not yet transmitted human-to-human.