Will Stewart – March 12, 2021
Russia has warned today that mutating H5N8 Bird Flu has a high risk of human-to-human transmission.
The alert appears to contradict the low threat position of the World Health Organisation.
This comes almost a month after scientists detected the first case of H5N8 transmission to humans at a poultry farm in southern Russia.
The Kremlin’s health watchdog chief Anna Popova said there was “a rather high probability” of transmission between humans.
“It is likely to happen,” she told TASS.
“Colleagues say that the mutation is continuing very actively.”
But she said that scientists had spotted the threat “before a disaster happened”.
Popova spoke after a report from popular Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP) warning of the threat of a “second Wuhan – or even worse”.
Scientists at Russia’s Porton Down – Vector State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology, once a Cold War biological warfare research plant in Siberia – are working on a vaccine, she said.