Short Wave - Do NYC Birds Hold The Clues To The Next Pandemic?

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

Most viruses that become epidemics in humans begin in other animals. It's how scientists suspect COVID-19 emerged. And now, less than five years after the start of the pandemic, some scientists are concerned about another disease that could do something similar: bird flu, or H5N1. Over the past year, the virus has spilled into cows and other animals — even infecting some people working closely with the animals. Some scientists hope to build a more resilient public health system by finding ways to detect and to track viruses as they spread in animals. One team in New York City is doing this by tapping high school students from underrepresented backgrounds. Together, they create a more equitable field of biologists while they also sniff out what could be the next pandemic.This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program. Want to know more about pandemic surveillance or virology? Email us at [e-mail] — we might cover it on a future episode! See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers. Anil Oza here. Previous Shortwave fact checker, current reporter with stat news, and I'm dropping in to tell you a story about pandemic preparedness. And look, for many people, pandemics are the last thing they want to be thinking about. But it's important, when possible, to know where and when pandemics will arise. Even though it can be hard for researchers to get that work funded.

I had to write a grant proposal. So I wasn't initially do something like similar to like what we're doing now. I think it was avian coronavirus detection in New York City because that's a different virus entirely. And then I ended up doing like the more molecular side of avian influenza. This is Mysha Olaub, a researcher in New York, currently working on avian influenza surveillance. I met her at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan so she could tell me about a grant that she's working on. I wrote about like a certain time of interview on response. within avian influenza in a certain cell line.

But one thing I left out is that mysha's in high school. That grant was just a homework assignment. But Misha is part of an important effort to understand how viruses move through birds. In the same way that many scientists believe COVID made its way into humans by jumping over from other animals, there's a fear that a similar thing can happen again. One potential solution is surveillance, keeping an eye on birds and other animals to know when a possible outbreak is bubbling up.

Surveillance is, it's important, but it's ongoing work, right? You don't stop. You just keep looking, and the longer you look, the better picture you actually get. That's Christine Marezi, a geneticist who works for biopust, a non-profit that teaches students about the sciences. She tells me, surveillance programs for viruses and other pathogens are all too rare in urban settings. even after all these years of the COVID pandemic. People are fatigued to think about viruses, right? There's something like, you know, well, is it dangerous with humans?

You may find something birds. This does not say, you know, the start of a new, like, human pandemic, of course, right? And then maybe people zone out. But Christine isn't just trying to build a surveillance program. She's hoping to make one that hunts down viruses as they spread, all while building up a more equitable field of virologists. And to do that, she's tapping high school students from underrepresented backgrounds to do the benchwork of finding and cataloging viruses in the hope that the experience will set them up for careers in the sciences. So today on the show, how a bunch of high schoolers are snitting out the next pandemic.

You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. To track down the next pandemic, before it happens, Biobus has been monitoring wild birth. in New York to see what they can find. And at the beginning of the year, they started to see signs of avian flu. In March, the virus showed up in cows. As H5N1 continues to jump into mammals, most recently dairy cows,

many scientists are concerned that we're not watching closely enough as this virus continues to spread. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first case in humans. None of the first known case of a human getting bird flu from a mammal in the U.S. which we began to see in more states.

Doctor, we've just got some breaking news just into us. I wanted to run by you. The CDC confirming the first human case of bird flu in Missouri today. The bird flu operate here in Colorado is spreading once again, this time to a person. But Christine and Company were thinking about bird flu way before it was making headlines. In fact, she was thinking about it in early 2020. As she was working up a proposal to start a virus surveillance program, COVID was sweeping across the country.

But some of our colleagues, like Phil Mead, and other scientists working with Biobus, was surprised that the public didn't already have H5N1 on their radar. I think we were a little surprised that the public wasn't more worried about, you know, H5N1 coming in United States and North America, because, you know, when I grew up, we had the sort of a 2004-era bird flu scare. and I remember, you know, there being, you know, news segments and made for TV movies, like disaster movies, was centering bird flu. I think that the main thing that has kept it sort of lower on the radar is that there have been very few human cases of this virus. Part of what Phil and Byobus more generally does is keep track of the strains of H5N1 that are in birds.

While the risk of H5N1 is generally pretty low, there's a worry that the virus can pick up mutations that help it, A, jump into humans, or B, cause worse outcomes if it does jump into humans. How they do it exactly is kind of gross, so I'll let Misha take that. Birds shed virus in their poop. And the fact that there's just like free, you know,

evidence everywhere in the park is crazy to me. You know, we had, like, all our PPE, like, masks, our gloves. We had a lot of, like, sanitary things in general. So, like, we didn't, you know, he's a cut in, like, a swab to swab the poop. And then you put it in, like, a tube. And then the tube goes into another plastic bag, which then goes into a bigger plastic bag. So there's a lot of, you know. But they weren't just checking poop.

After the Biobus team detected and reported avian flu in New York birds in April, the researchers wondered if there was another way that people could. get infected. Milk. When I first found out, I was like, oh my God, there's, there's piracy milk. Like, what? Like, this is getting closer to humans. That's Swazi Shabalala. She had another high school student on the team, Rebecca Ra, say they pivoted from their poop swabbing to grocery shopping. The first time we found out that, like, we were going to start pivoting to milk was when

me and Rita went in on a Thursday. And we walked in and Kirsteen was like, oh, we're going to go shopping today. And then we're like, oh, okay, like, I don't know, like get more PCR boxes. Like, what's going on? And then Christine was like, no, we're getting milk. And then, like, I didn't know if I heard it right. I was like, read it. Like, did she say milk? And then we went to the grocery store and we came back with like,

gallons of it. That was actually a workout. And we, yeah. I feel like it was somewhat chaotic, but it wasn't, like, or didn't seem that bad because it was more exciting. Luckily, they didn't find any evidence of virus and milk products. But the fact that they could so quickly answer questions that people had is a testament to community science and involving people who are professional scientists in the scientific process.

There's agencies out there. Do these kind of work, right? But I don't know sometimes, but that's why I say that's the power of community science. You know, we start looking when nobody else is looking. We have eyes and ears on the ground. Other people might not have it. While it was super cool to watch the work Biobus was doing and how knowledgeable these high school students were, I couldn't help but wonder, should this huge work of tracking and preventing pandemics be falling to them and not government agencies?

Yeah, it would be nice to have more support, but, you know, then we also hear in the States where people just like take things in their own hands. Why don't we build a citizen science program around? You know, why can't we get the community involved? And that's very powerful, especially if we do things right. That's the trick about community science because you want to pay attention to everything from like, again, who do you partner with, what community you're serving? That idea of equity has stuck with me. Bibus is doing good work in having students from underrepresented communities lead the way on detecting viruses, whether or not that task should fall to them. But as the recent cases of H5N1 have showed, we haven't been doing enough.

And the people that have gotten sick have tended to be farm workers. many of them who are undocumented migrants. Those workers tend to be less visible to the rest of us. And that invisibility, how removed farm workers are from most people's daily lives, was pretty clear in Misha's conversations with her parents in New York City. I was telling my parents about it, and they were like, what's avian flu? And I was like, well, think of like swine flu. And then they were like, oh, my God.

I was like, no, no, no, not to that extent. I was like, well, like, because, you know, we're post-pandemic now. And I was like, it's another virus, you know, things like this. And I think my parents, like, telling them they were like, oh, well, so birds can get it. And they were like, their main concern was like, we can't get it. I was like, no, not yet, hypothetically. So like, it's just like isolated, well, it was then, like, mostly isolated in like the bird population. It's a gap that researchers have long struggle to bridge, how to bring a booming and sometimes seemingly hypothetical threat home to give it urgency and,

and mediacy. Telling my parents, or like, tell my family in general, like that, like, not even my family, but also my classmates, like, hey, I do research on avian flu, and they're like, like, why is that important? Like, why do you need to do that? And it's like, well, why wouldn't it be important?

Like, viruses are so unpredictable. And like, anything can literally happen. Since I last talked to Biobus over the summer, there's been more cases of H5N1 in humans, though the CDC says it's still low risk to people. But there are even broader, questions. There haven't been H5N1 deaths in the U.S., but there have been in other parts of the world. And we've let H5N1 spread so much in animals that it's become panzoatic or a pandemic

in animals, which raises a big if. If this pandemic or another one spills into humans, will we be ready? This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones and I checked the facts. Wacey Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm the NILOSA. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.