Reacción a "The H5N1 avian influenza virus is transmitted between mammals from contaminated cow's milk and reaches the mammary glands"

The H5N1 avian influenza virus currently circulating and responsible for the recent outbreaks in dairy cattle in the US has broken all the moulds of the usual avian influenza viruses, conquering new continents, affecting many new species and losing its seasonality.

The occasional jumps to mammals, including occasionally humans, have the scientific community vigilant and working on the characterisation of viruses emerging in new mammalian species to understand the risk they pose to global/human health. This work is part of these studies, which range from characterising the bovine udder epithelium and virus replication, transmission to calves or transmissibility to abundant and important mammals for the epidemiology of influenza A viruses such as pigs, to studies of transmissibility between different mammalian species or between individuals. Here, a team with extensive experience in the study of influenza A viruses and with abundant means to perform experimental studies in high biosafety laboratories, experimentally demonstrates several characteristics of one of the viruses isolated from a dairy cow. His results show that transmission of this particular virus between ferrets, a species commonly used as a model for humans, is inefficient. However, it highlights other characteristics that reflect the risk posed by these viruses, such as the ability to bind to both avian and human respiratory epithelial receptors.

Overall, it reflects, like many other papers, particularities of the virus that may constitute a high risk if other adaptive changes are added that may allow the virus to easily transmit and infect mammals, including humans.