Wired | January 24, 2022
Though there have been notifications of those outbreaks—the regulations governing the WHO require countries to send immediate notification of high-path avian flu—they have not all included details about genetic sequences or spread. Researchers are hungry for answers. “The question is: What’s new?” says Daniel Lucey, an infectious-disease physician and senior scholar at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “The quantity of outbreaks is massive, but has there been a change in qualitative risk? Have the sequences changed so the virus is more likely to infect humans? Can we document person-to-person spread?”