Bird flu warnings are being ignored. I’ve seen this pattern before

There’s an unwritten rule in publishing, or so I’ve been told: don’t write about COVID. Our collective attention span has been saturated by those endless months holed up in attics and cramped corners of apartments, staring out at a world we could no longer take part in. When the worst of it passed, we felt an urge to close that chapter, to padlock it behind a heavy latch. Disease surveillance is fraying.ZUMA Press, Inc But in doing so, we also tuck away the hard-won lessons of that time: how quickly systems buckle, how two decades of coronavirus warnings accumulated without adequate preparedness , and how the very mechanisms we rely on for safety can become the scaffolding of a next disaster. This matters now as another threat is taking shape: highly pathogenic avian influenza, known as bird flu. Bird flu still poses a low‐probability threat of sustained human transmission. But that doesn’t make the virus harmless. The H5 viruses are brutally lethal to birds - 9 million have died outright, and hundreds of millions have been culled to contain the spread. Alarming is the virus’s expanding reach into mammals. So far, at least 74 mammal species, from elephant seals to polar bears, have suffered die‐offs. The individual cases are situated within a broader shift. Dense poultry farms create opportunities for the virus to hop species. Over a thousand US dairy herds have tested positive in the past two years, and viral fragments have even been detected in milk - a worrying route of spillover. Every jump is a probe for new footholds. Europe is seeing a surge too . From early September to mid-November 2025, 1,444 infected wild birds were found across 26 countries: a quadrupling compared with the year before. Human cases remain rare: only 992 confirmed H5N1 infections worldwide since 2003, though with a near‐50% fatality rate. But the numbers are increasing. The Americas have logged 75 cases since 2022, and in November, the US recorded its first H5N5 death in a patient with existing health problems. And although no human cases have been reported in Europe, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control warns that the widespread animal circulation raises the risk of spillover. My research focuses on how warnings collapse before catastrophe, from geopolitical shocks to intelligence failures and industrial accidents. The pattern is often the same. Frontline observers spot something early, but the signal fades as it moves upward, diluted by bureaucracy, competing interpretations, or institutional forgetfulness. The recent Hong Kong fire is yet another tragic example: residents at Wang Fuk Court had raised multiple alarms about the styrofoam boards that ignited with a lighter, the uncertified netting and the pattern of ignored safety notices long before the blaze, yet those concerns never gained traction. The failures I study share recurring blind spots: weak signals drowned out by noise, bureaucratic habits that slow or soften uncomfortable messages, and the political instinct to downplay problems that threaten established narratives. When you see warning as a...

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