For years, scientists have issued warnings about bird flu. It is better known as H5N1. They fear it might someday make the dangerous leap from birds to humans. This could trigger a global health crisis.
Avian flu is a type of influenza. It is entrenched across South and South-East Asia. It has occasionally infected humans since emerging in China in the late 1990s. From 2003 to August 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported 990 human H5N1 cases across 25 countries. These cases include 475 deaths. This reflects a 48% fatality rate.
In the US alone, the virus has struck more than 180 million birds. It has spread to over 1,000 dairy herds in 18 states. At least 70 people have been infected, mostly farmworkers, causing several hospitalisations and one death. In January, three tigers and a leopard died at a wildlife rescue centre in India’s Nagpur city. The virus typically infects birds.
Symptoms in humans mimic a severe flu: high fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches and, at times, conjunctivitis. Some people have no symptoms at all. The risk to humans remains low, but authorities are watching H5N1 closely for any shift that could make it spread more easily.
That concern prompted new peer-reviewed modelling by Indian researchers Philip Cherian and Gautam Menon of Ashoka University. This modelling simulates how an H5N1 outbreak might unfold in humans. It also examines what early interventions could stop it before it spreads.
The model published in the BMC Public Health journal uses real world data. It also employs computer simulations to play out how an outbreak might spread in real life.
“The threat of an H5N1 pandemic in humans is real. However, we can hope to forestall it with better surveillance. A more nimble public-health response is also essential,” Prof Menon told the BBC.
A bird flu pandemic, researchers say, would begin quietly: a single infected bird passing the virus to a human – most likely a farmer, market worker or someone handling poultry. From there, the danger lies not in that first infection but in what happens next: sustained human-to-human transmission.
Because real outbreaks start with limited, messy data, the researchers turned to BharatSim, an open-source simulation platform originally built for Covid 19 modelling, but versatile enough to study other diseases.
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