burger menu icon
Programs
Newscasts
Live
OneTV Logo
OneFM Logo
Life
Nutrition Beauty Health

WHO: US to participate in meeting on influenza vaccine composition

The United States will take part in a World Health Organization meeting at the end of the month to determine the composition of upcoming influenza vaccines, the agency's official said at a press conference on Wednesday.Washington officially left the WHO in January after a year of warnings that doing so would hurt public health in the U.S. and globally, saying its decision reflected failures in the U.N. health agency's management of the COVID-19 pandemic.It has been unclear how much the country would work with the WHO following the departure, and the collaboration on flu vaccines is a sign of an ongoing link.Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's director for epidemic and pandemic preparedness, said the global influenza surveillance and response network — a system of more than 150 laboratories across 130 countries — plays a central role in tracking seasonal and zoonotic influenza viruses and updates vaccine recommendations every six months.There are seven collaborating centers, including facilities in the U.S., the UK and Australia.Van Kerkhove said there had also been "a slight dip" in the global circulation of influenza virus samples after funding challenges, but shipments had now resumed.GUINEA-BISSAU VACCINE STUDY 'UNETHICAL' - TEDROSAt the same press conference, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said a planned U.S.-funded research in Guinea-Bissau to study the effects of hepatitis B vaccines on newborns, which has drawn significant criticism, is unethical."As far as WHO's position is concerned, it's unethical to proceed with this study," Tedros said, but added that it was ultimately a domestic decision.African health officials in January said the study has not been canceled, but will undergo further ethical review.Scientists have opposed the study because some of the newborns involved would not get the vaccine, which is known to be safe and save lives, in a country with high rates of hepatitis B. The disease transmits commonly from mother to child during birth and can cause liver failure and cancer.The study's researchers say the project is ethical because the vaccine is not yet administered at birth in Guinea-Bissau, where the first dose is given at six weeks.The research was due to investigate potential "non-specific effects" of the vaccine, including skin disorders and neuro-developmental disorders, such as autism.

11-02-2026 20:37

To Hug or Not to Hug? Can Comfort Be Measured in Seconds?

On National Hugging Day, hugs are everywhere. They appear in captions, campaigns, and cheerful reminders to squeeze a little longer, as if comfort could be measured in seconds. The hug is often presented as a universal language, simple and harmless, an emotional shortcut we all supposedly understand the same way.Psychology, however, tells a more nuanced story.For clinical psychologist Tatiana Maalouf, hugging is neither a trend nor a sentimental extra. Speaking to MTV’s English website, she explains that hugs can be a powerful biological and emotional resource, but only for some people, and only in certain contexts.From the moment we are born, regulation does not begin within us but between us, Maalouf explains. Long before language, the nervous system learns safety through proximity, rhythm, and presence. For many, physical touch, including hugging, becomes one of the earliest ways the body recognizes safety. When a hug is wanted and experienced as secure, it bypasses language and speaks directly to the nervous system.Neurobiologically, hugging can trigger the release of oxytocin, the hormone linked to bonding and emotional regulation, while reducing cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, according to Maalouf. This shift allows the body to step out of survival mode. Breathing slows, muscles relax, and the nervous system receives a quiet reassurance that it is not alone. “Hugs don’t fix the problem,” she notes, “but they can help the body feel safe enough to cope with it.”But this experience is not universal.Not all nervous systems experience touch as calming. For some people, Maalouf explains, because of trauma, personal history, sensory sensitivity, cultural norms, or neurodivergence, physical contact can feel intrusive or even threatening. In those cases, a hug does not regulate the body. It activates it. What is intended as comfort may instead trigger distress.This is why consent and emotional attunement are essential. A helpful hug, Maalouf says, is mutual, responsive, and respectful of boundaries. Without that, touch loses its regulating power.Emotionally, hugs work through co regulation, but co regulation is not limited to physical contact. Safety can also be created through eye contact, tone of voice, shared silence, or simply being emotionally present. The key ingredient, she stresses, is not the hug itself, but the felt sense of being with someone.In today’s fast paced and highly digital world, physical affection has decreased for many, while emotional overload has increased. Screens allow connection, but they cannot replace embodied presence. At the same time, Maalouf cautions against pushing physical closeness in the name of connection. True closeness respects differences in how people experience comfort and safety.Hugs can be especially meaningful during periods of grief, stress, or uncertainty, but only for those who experience touch as safe, she says. For others, support may take quieter forms such as sitting nearby, holding space, or listening without trying to fix.As for how long a hug should last or how often people should hug, the answer lies not in numbers. Research suggests longer hugs may enhance oxytocin release, but no duration makes an unwanted hug beneficial. Regulation comes from choice, not exposure.From a mental health perspective, National Hugging Day is not about hugging more. It is an invitation to reflect on how we seek comfort, how we respect boundaries, and how we offer care in ways that truly feel safe.Hugs do not heal everyone.But being seen, respected, and emotionally held, in whatever form that takes, remains essential for all of us.

21-01-2026 14:23

Astronomers Spot Mysterious ‘Iron Bar’ in Well-Known Ring Nebula

The Ring Nebula, a stunning celestial structure residing in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, was discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1779 and has been studied extensively ever since. But that does not mean we have it all figured out.Researchers have spotted a large cloud of iron atoms in the shape of a bar stretching about 3.7 trillion miles (6 trillion km) long across the face of the nebula, which is a glowing shell of gas and dust expelled by a dying star, and are searching for an explanation.They said it is possible the iron atoms, collectively comparable to the mass of Earth's molten iron core, are the remnants of a rocky planet that was vaporized when the star threw off its outer layers, though they cautioned that such an explanation is mere conjecture at the moment. The inner rocky planets of our solar system, potentially even Earth, could face the same fate when the sun goes through these same death throes billions of years from now.The researchers made the observation using a new instrument called WEAVE, short for WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer, on the William Herschel Telescope, located on the Atlantic Ocean island of La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands."It is exciting to see that even a very familiar object - much studied over many decades - can throw up a new surprise when observed in a new way," said astronomer Roger Wesson of Cardiff University in Wales and University College London, lead author of the research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society."It's a classic object for professional and amateur astronomers alike to observe," Wesson said. "Although it's too faint to see with the naked eye, it's quite easy to spot with binoculars. In a small telescope, you can see the ring-like appearance."The Ring Nebula, also called Messier 57, is located about 2,600 light years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). It is believed to have formed roughly 4,000 years ago, very recently in cosmic time.It is familiar even to beginning students of astronomy."You'll find it in many astronomy textbooks," University College London astronomer and study co-author Janet Drew said.That is why the iron bar is so intriguing."No other chemical element that we have detected seems to sit in this same bar. This is weird, frankly. Its importance lies in the simple fact that we have no ready explanation for it, yet," Drew said. "The origin of the iron might trace back to the vaporization of a planet. But there could be another way to make the feature that doesn't involve a planet.""A planet like the Earth would contain enough iron to form the bar, but how it would end up in a bar shape has no good explanation," Wesson said.The nebula formed when a star about twice the sun's mass ran out of nuclear fuel in its core, swelled up into what is called a red giant and expelled its outer layers before becoming a compact stellar remnant known as a white dwarf, approximately the size of our planet."From the perspective of Earth, it has the appearance of a ring, although it's believed that it's actually more like a cylinder of material that we are seeing end-on. It's made up mostly of hydrogen and helium, with small quantities of heavier elements," Wesson said.About 3,000 such nebulas are known in our galaxy. Studying them lets astronomers examine the life stage of stars when chemical elements forged by nuclear processes inside them are released into interstellar space to be recycled and contribute to the next generation of stars and planets."We look forward to getting more data to follow up on this discovery, to try to unravel this new problem and work out where the iron bar has come from," Wesson said.

19-01-2026 14:10

Indian Scientists Predict How Bird Flu Could Spread to Humans

For years, scientists have warned that bird flu - better known as H5N1 - could one day make the dangerous leap from birds to humans and trigger a global health crisis.Avian flu - a type of influenza - is entrenched across South and South-East Asia and 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, including 475 deaths - a 48% fatality rate.In the US alone, the virus has struck more than 180 million birds, spread to over 1,000 dairy herds in 18 states, and infected at least 70 people - 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 from the virus that 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 is what prompted new peer-reviewed modelling by Indian researchers Philip Cherian and Gautam Menon of Ashoka University, which simulates how an H5N1 outbreak might unfold in humans and what early interventions could stop it before it spreads.In other words, the model published in the BMC Public Health journal uses real world data and computer simulations to play out how an outbreak might spread in real life."The threat of an H5N1 pandemic in humans is a genuine one, but we can hope to forestall it through better surveillance and a more nimble public-health response," 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.The key takeaway for policymakers is how narrow the window for action can be before an outbreak spirals out of control, the researchers say.The paper estimates that once cases rise beyond roughly two to 10, the disease is likely to spread beyond primary and secondary contacts.Primary contacts are people who have had direct, close contact with an infected person, such as household members, caregivers or close colleagues. Secondary contacts are those who have not met the infected person but have been in close contact with a primary contact.If households of primary contacts are quarantined when just two cases are detected, the outbreak can almost certainly be contained, the research found.But by the time 10 cases are identified, it is overwhelmingly likely that the infection has already spread into the wider population, making its trajectory virtually indistinguishable from a scenario with no early intervention.To keep the study grounded in real-world conditions, the researchers chose a model of a single village in Namakkal district, Tamil Nadu - the heart of India's poultry belt.Namakkal is home to more than 1,600 poultry farms and some 70 million chickens; it produces over 60 million eggs a day.A village of 9,667 residents was generated using a synthetic community - households, workplaces, market spaces - and seeded with infected birds to mimic real-life exposure. (A synthetic community is an artificial, computer-generated population that mimics the characteristics and behaviours of a real population.)In the simulation, the virus starts at one workplace - a mid-sized farm or wet market - spreads first to people there (primary contacts), and then moves outward to others (seconday contacts) they interact with through homes, schools and other workplaces. Homes, schools and workplaces formed a fixed network.By tracking primary and secondary infections, the researchers estimated key transmission metrics, including the basic reproductive number, R0 - which measures how many people, on average, one infected person passes the virus on to. In the absence of a real-world pandemic, the researchers instead modelled a range of plausible transmission speeds.Then they tested what happens when different interventions - culling birds, quarantining close contacts and targeted vaccination - kicked in.The results were blunt.Culling of birds works - but only if done before the virus infects a human.If a spillover does occur, timing becomes everything, the researchers found.Isolating infected people and quarantining households can stop the virus at the secondary stage. But once tertiary infections appear - friends of friends, or contacts of contacts - the outbreak slips out of control unless authorities impose much tougher measures, including lockdowns.Targeted vaccination helps by raising the threshold at which the virus can sustain itself, though it does little to change the immediate risk within households.The simulations also highlighted an awkward trade-off.Quarantine, introduced too early, keeps families together for long stretches - and increases the chance that infected individuals will pass the virus to those they live with. Introduced too late, it does little to slow the outbreak at all.The researchers say this approach comes with caveats.The model relies on one synthetic village, with fixed household sizes, workplaces and daily movement patterns. It does not include simultaneous outbreaks seeded by migratory birds or by poultry networks. Nor does it account for behavioural shifts - mask-wearing, for instance - once people know birds are dying.Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Atlanta-based Emory University, adds another caveat: this simulation model "assumes a very efficient transmission of influenza viruses"."Transmission is complex and not every strain will have the same efficiency as another," she says, adding that scientists are also now starting to understand that not all people infected with seasonal flu spread the virus equally.She says emerging research shows that only a "subset of flu-positive individuals actually shed infectious influenza virus into the air".This mirrors the super-spreader phenomenon seen with Covid-19, though it is far less well characterised for flu - a gap that could strongly influence how the virus spreads through human populations.What happens if H5N1 becomes successful in the human population?Dr Lakdawala believes that it "will cause a large disruption likely more similar to the 2009 [swine flu] pandemic rather than Covid-19"."This is because we are more prepared for an influenza pandemic. We have known licensed antivirals that are effective against the H5N1 strains as an early defence and stockpiled candidate H5 vaccines that could be deployed in the short term."But complacency would be a mistake. Dr Lakdawala says if H5N1 becomes established in humans, it could re-assort - or intermingle - with existing strains, amplifying its public-health impact. Such mixing could reshape seasonal influenza, triggering "chaotic and unpredictable seasonal epidemics".The Indian modellers say the simulations can be run in real time and updated as data come in.With refinements - better reporting delays, asymptomatic cases - they could give public-health officials something priceless in the early hours of an outbreak: a sense of which actions matter most, before the window for containment snaps shut.

18-12-2025 09:40

Huge Undersea Wall Dating From 5000 BC Found in France

French marine archaeologists have discovered a massive undersea wall off the coast of Brittany, dating from around 5,000 BC.They think it could be from a stone age society whose disappearance under rising seas was the origin of a local sunken city myth.The 120-metre (394ft) wall – the biggest underwater construction ever found in France – was either a fish-trap or a dyke for protection against rising sea-levels, the archaeologists believe.When it was built on the Ile de Sein at Brittany's western tip, the wall would have been on the shore-line – between the high and low tide marks. Today it is under nine metres of water as the island has shrunk to a fraction of its former size.The wall is on average 20 metres wide and two metres high. At regular intervals divers found large granite standing stones – or monoliths – protruding above the wall in two parallel lines.It is believed these were originally placed on the bedrock and then the wall built around them out of slabs and smaller stones. If the fish-trap hypothesis is the right one, then the lines of protruding monoliths would have also supported a "net" made of sticks and branches to catch fish as the tide retreated.With an overall mass of 3,300 tonnes, the wall must have been the work of a substantial settled community. And to have lasted 7,000 years, it was clearly an extremely solid structure."It was built by a very structured society of hunter-gatherers, of a kind that became sedentary when resources permitted. That or it was made by one of the Neolithic populations that arrived here around 5,000 BC," said archaeologist Yvan Pailler.The monoliths that form the basis of the wall are similar to - but predate - the famous menhirs that dot the Brittany countryside and are associated with the Neolithic culture.According to Pailler, there could have been a transmission of know-how on extracting, cutting and transporting the stones between older Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and incoming Neolithic agriculturists.The wall was discovered after local geologist Yves Fouquet studied undersea depth charts drawn up using the latest radar technology. "Just off Sein I saw this 120-metre line blocking off an undersea valley. It couldn't be natural," he told Le Monde newspaper.Archaeologists made their first exploration in summer 2022, but had to wait till the following winter – when the seaweed had died back – before they could map the wall properly.In a paper in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, the writers conjecture that sites such as this may lie at the origin of local Breton legends of sunken cities. One such lost city – Ys – was believed to lie in the Bay of Douarnenez, just a few kilometres to the east."It is likely that the abandonment of a territory developed by a highly structured society has become deeply rooted in people's memories," the paper says."The submersion caused by the rapid rise in sea level, followed by the abandonment of fishing structures, protective works, and habitation sites, must have left a lasting impression."

11-12-2025 19:49

{{ article.title }}

{{safeHTML(article.Text)}}

{{article.publishDate}}

Article Image

More

WHO: US to participate in meeting on influenza vaccine composition

The United States will take part in a World Health Organization meeting at the end of the month to determine the composition of upcoming influenza vaccines, the agency's official said at a press conference on Wednesday.Washington officially left the WHO in January after a year of warnings that doing so would hurt public health in the U.S. and globally, saying its decision reflected failures in the U.N. health agency's management of the COVID-19 pandemic.It has been unclear how much the country would work with the WHO following the departure, and the collaboration on flu vaccines is a sign of an ongoing link.Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's director for epidemic and pandemic preparedness, said the global influenza surveillance and response network — a system of more than 150 laboratories across 130 countries — plays a central role in tracking seasonal and zoonotic influenza viruses and updates vaccine recommendations every six months.There are seven collaborating centers, including facilities in the U.S., the UK and Australia.Van Kerkhove said there had also been "a slight dip" in the global circulation of influenza virus samples after funding challenges, but shipments had now resumed.GUINEA-BISSAU VACCINE STUDY 'UNETHICAL' - TEDROSAt the same press conference, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said a planned U.S.-funded research in Guinea-Bissau to study the effects of hepatitis B vaccines on newborns, which has drawn significant criticism, is unethical."As far as WHO's position is concerned, it's unethical to proceed with this study," Tedros said, but added that it was ultimately a domestic decision.African health officials in January said the study has not been canceled, but will undergo further ethical review.Scientists have opposed the study because some of the newborns involved would not get the vaccine, which is known to be safe and save lives, in a country with high rates of hepatitis B. The disease transmits commonly from mother to child during birth and can cause liver failure and cancer.The study's researchers say the project is ethical because the vaccine is not yet administered at birth in Guinea-Bissau, where the first dose is given at six weeks.The research was due to investigate potential "non-specific effects" of the vaccine, including skin disorders and neuro-developmental disorders, such as autism.

11-02-2026 20:37

To Hug or Not to Hug? Can Comfort Be Measured in Seconds?

On National Hugging Day, hugs are everywhere. They appear in captions, campaigns, and cheerful reminders to squeeze a little longer, as if comfort could be measured in seconds. The hug is often presented as a universal language, simple and harmless, an emotional shortcut we all supposedly understand the same way.Psychology, however, tells a more nuanced story.For clinical psychologist Tatiana Maalouf, hugging is neither a trend nor a sentimental extra. Speaking to MTV’s English website, she explains that hugs can be a powerful biological and emotional resource, but only for some people, and only in certain contexts.From the moment we are born, regulation does not begin within us but between us, Maalouf explains. Long before language, the nervous system learns safety through proximity, rhythm, and presence. For many, physical touch, including hugging, becomes one of the earliest ways the body recognizes safety. When a hug is wanted and experienced as secure, it bypasses language and speaks directly to the nervous system.Neurobiologically, hugging can trigger the release of oxytocin, the hormone linked to bonding and emotional regulation, while reducing cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, according to Maalouf. This shift allows the body to step out of survival mode. Breathing slows, muscles relax, and the nervous system receives a quiet reassurance that it is not alone. “Hugs don’t fix the problem,” she notes, “but they can help the body feel safe enough to cope with it.”But this experience is not universal.Not all nervous systems experience touch as calming. For some people, Maalouf explains, because of trauma, personal history, sensory sensitivity, cultural norms, or neurodivergence, physical contact can feel intrusive or even threatening. In those cases, a hug does not regulate the body. It activates it. What is intended as comfort may instead trigger distress.This is why consent and emotional attunement are essential. A helpful hug, Maalouf says, is mutual, responsive, and respectful of boundaries. Without that, touch loses its regulating power.Emotionally, hugs work through co regulation, but co regulation is not limited to physical contact. Safety can also be created through eye contact, tone of voice, shared silence, or simply being emotionally present. The key ingredient, she stresses, is not the hug itself, but the felt sense of being with someone.In today’s fast paced and highly digital world, physical affection has decreased for many, while emotional overload has increased. Screens allow connection, but they cannot replace embodied presence. At the same time, Maalouf cautions against pushing physical closeness in the name of connection. True closeness respects differences in how people experience comfort and safety.Hugs can be especially meaningful during periods of grief, stress, or uncertainty, but only for those who experience touch as safe, she says. For others, support may take quieter forms such as sitting nearby, holding space, or listening without trying to fix.As for how long a hug should last or how often people should hug, the answer lies not in numbers. Research suggests longer hugs may enhance oxytocin release, but no duration makes an unwanted hug beneficial. Regulation comes from choice, not exposure.From a mental health perspective, National Hugging Day is not about hugging more. It is an invitation to reflect on how we seek comfort, how we respect boundaries, and how we offer care in ways that truly feel safe.Hugs do not heal everyone.But being seen, respected, and emotionally held, in whatever form that takes, remains essential for all of us.

21-01-2026 14:23

Astronomers Spot Mysterious ‘Iron Bar’ in Well-Known Ring Nebula

The Ring Nebula, a stunning celestial structure residing in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, was discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1779 and has been studied extensively ever since. But that does not mean we have it all figured out.Researchers have spotted a large cloud of iron atoms in the shape of a bar stretching about 3.7 trillion miles (6 trillion km) long across the face of the nebula, which is a glowing shell of gas and dust expelled by a dying star, and are searching for an explanation.They said it is possible the iron atoms, collectively comparable to the mass of Earth's molten iron core, are the remnants of a rocky planet that was vaporized when the star threw off its outer layers, though they cautioned that such an explanation is mere conjecture at the moment. The inner rocky planets of our solar system, potentially even Earth, could face the same fate when the sun goes through these same death throes billions of years from now.The researchers made the observation using a new instrument called WEAVE, short for WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer, on the William Herschel Telescope, located on the Atlantic Ocean island of La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands."It is exciting to see that even a very familiar object - much studied over many decades - can throw up a new surprise when observed in a new way," said astronomer Roger Wesson of Cardiff University in Wales and University College London, lead author of the research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society."It's a classic object for professional and amateur astronomers alike to observe," Wesson said. "Although it's too faint to see with the naked eye, it's quite easy to spot with binoculars. In a small telescope, you can see the ring-like appearance."The Ring Nebula, also called Messier 57, is located about 2,600 light years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). It is believed to have formed roughly 4,000 years ago, very recently in cosmic time.It is familiar even to beginning students of astronomy."You'll find it in many astronomy textbooks," University College London astronomer and study co-author Janet Drew said.That is why the iron bar is so intriguing."No other chemical element that we have detected seems to sit in this same bar. This is weird, frankly. Its importance lies in the simple fact that we have no ready explanation for it, yet," Drew said. "The origin of the iron might trace back to the vaporization of a planet. But there could be another way to make the feature that doesn't involve a planet.""A planet like the Earth would contain enough iron to form the bar, but how it would end up in a bar shape has no good explanation," Wesson said.The nebula formed when a star about twice the sun's mass ran out of nuclear fuel in its core, swelled up into what is called a red giant and expelled its outer layers before becoming a compact stellar remnant known as a white dwarf, approximately the size of our planet."From the perspective of Earth, it has the appearance of a ring, although it's believed that it's actually more like a cylinder of material that we are seeing end-on. It's made up mostly of hydrogen and helium, with small quantities of heavier elements," Wesson said.About 3,000 such nebulas are known in our galaxy. Studying them lets astronomers examine the life stage of stars when chemical elements forged by nuclear processes inside them are released into interstellar space to be recycled and contribute to the next generation of stars and planets."We look forward to getting more data to follow up on this discovery, to try to unravel this new problem and work out where the iron bar has come from," Wesson said.

19-01-2026 14:10

Indian Scientists Predict How Bird Flu Could Spread to Humans

For years, scientists have warned that bird flu - better known as H5N1 - could one day make the dangerous leap from birds to humans and trigger a global health crisis.Avian flu - a type of influenza - is entrenched across South and South-East Asia and 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, including 475 deaths - a 48% fatality rate.In the US alone, the virus has struck more than 180 million birds, spread to over 1,000 dairy herds in 18 states, and infected at least 70 people - 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 from the virus that 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 is what prompted new peer-reviewed modelling by Indian researchers Philip Cherian and Gautam Menon of Ashoka University, which simulates how an H5N1 outbreak might unfold in humans and what early interventions could stop it before it spreads.In other words, the model published in the BMC Public Health journal uses real world data and computer simulations to play out how an outbreak might spread in real life."The threat of an H5N1 pandemic in humans is a genuine one, but we can hope to forestall it through better surveillance and a more nimble public-health response," 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.The key takeaway for policymakers is how narrow the window for action can be before an outbreak spirals out of control, the researchers say.The paper estimates that once cases rise beyond roughly two to 10, the disease is likely to spread beyond primary and secondary contacts.Primary contacts are people who have had direct, close contact with an infected person, such as household members, caregivers or close colleagues. Secondary contacts are those who have not met the infected person but have been in close contact with a primary contact.If households of primary contacts are quarantined when just two cases are detected, the outbreak can almost certainly be contained, the research found.But by the time 10 cases are identified, it is overwhelmingly likely that the infection has already spread into the wider population, making its trajectory virtually indistinguishable from a scenario with no early intervention.To keep the study grounded in real-world conditions, the researchers chose a model of a single village in Namakkal district, Tamil Nadu - the heart of India's poultry belt.Namakkal is home to more than 1,600 poultry farms and some 70 million chickens; it produces over 60 million eggs a day.A village of 9,667 residents was generated using a synthetic community - households, workplaces, market spaces - and seeded with infected birds to mimic real-life exposure. (A synthetic community is an artificial, computer-generated population that mimics the characteristics and behaviours of a real population.)In the simulation, the virus starts at one workplace - a mid-sized farm or wet market - spreads first to people there (primary contacts), and then moves outward to others (seconday contacts) they interact with through homes, schools and other workplaces. Homes, schools and workplaces formed a fixed network.By tracking primary and secondary infections, the researchers estimated key transmission metrics, including the basic reproductive number, R0 - which measures how many people, on average, one infected person passes the virus on to. In the absence of a real-world pandemic, the researchers instead modelled a range of plausible transmission speeds.Then they tested what happens when different interventions - culling birds, quarantining close contacts and targeted vaccination - kicked in.The results were blunt.Culling of birds works - but only if done before the virus infects a human.If a spillover does occur, timing becomes everything, the researchers found.Isolating infected people and quarantining households can stop the virus at the secondary stage. But once tertiary infections appear - friends of friends, or contacts of contacts - the outbreak slips out of control unless authorities impose much tougher measures, including lockdowns.Targeted vaccination helps by raising the threshold at which the virus can sustain itself, though it does little to change the immediate risk within households.The simulations also highlighted an awkward trade-off.Quarantine, introduced too early, keeps families together for long stretches - and increases the chance that infected individuals will pass the virus to those they live with. Introduced too late, it does little to slow the outbreak at all.The researchers say this approach comes with caveats.The model relies on one synthetic village, with fixed household sizes, workplaces and daily movement patterns. It does not include simultaneous outbreaks seeded by migratory birds or by poultry networks. Nor does it account for behavioural shifts - mask-wearing, for instance - once people know birds are dying.Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Atlanta-based Emory University, adds another caveat: this simulation model "assumes a very efficient transmission of influenza viruses"."Transmission is complex and not every strain will have the same efficiency as another," she says, adding that scientists are also now starting to understand that not all people infected with seasonal flu spread the virus equally.She says emerging research shows that only a "subset of flu-positive individuals actually shed infectious influenza virus into the air".This mirrors the super-spreader phenomenon seen with Covid-19, though it is far less well characterised for flu - a gap that could strongly influence how the virus spreads through human populations.What happens if H5N1 becomes successful in the human population?Dr Lakdawala believes that it "will cause a large disruption likely more similar to the 2009 [swine flu] pandemic rather than Covid-19"."This is because we are more prepared for an influenza pandemic. We have known licensed antivirals that are effective against the H5N1 strains as an early defence and stockpiled candidate H5 vaccines that could be deployed in the short term."But complacency would be a mistake. Dr Lakdawala says if H5N1 becomes established in humans, it could re-assort - or intermingle - with existing strains, amplifying its public-health impact. Such mixing could reshape seasonal influenza, triggering "chaotic and unpredictable seasonal epidemics".The Indian modellers say the simulations can be run in real time and updated as data come in.With refinements - better reporting delays, asymptomatic cases - they could give public-health officials something priceless in the early hours of an outbreak: a sense of which actions matter most, before the window for containment snaps shut.

18-12-2025 09:40

{{ article.title }}

{{safeHTML(article.Text)}}

{{ article.publishDate }}

Article Image

More