Significant changes to the way commercial operations raise and product poultry may need to occur to stop the current outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI).

“Farms were built for efficiency. They were built for production. They weren’t necessarily built for disease control or biosecurity in mind,” Kay Russo, DVM, partner/veterinarian, RSM Consulting, said during the April 12 webinar, “What we know (or don’t) about H5N1 transmission on farms,” hosted by The Pandemic Center, part of the Brown University School of Public Health.

WASHINGTON, April 22, 2025: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) announced today that Dr. Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron and Dr. Stephanie Psaki have been appointed as non-resident senior advisers with the CSIS Global Health Policy Center.

Cameron and Psaki are global leaders in health security and biodefense with experience across academia, nonprofit organizations, and in government, including establishing global health security missions at the White House. Dr. Cameron is a professor of the practice and senior advisor to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. Dr. Psaki recently joined the Brown School of Public Health as a distinguished senior fellow and formerly served as special assistant to the president and the inaugural U.S. coordinator for global health security at the White House.

Of the many mistakes made in the COVID era, none were as glaring as prolonged school closures. The damages go beyond loss of learning, a dire consequence in its own right: Millions of families, both children and parents, still carry the scars of stress, depression, and isolation.

The closures began at a time of understandable panic, but that was only the beginning of the story. On February 25, 2020, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, led a press conference to address the developing coronavirus crisis. Messonnier warned the public that, without vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions—things like business closures or social-distancing guidelines—would be the most important tools in the country’s response. “What is appropriate for one community seeing local transmission won’t necessarily be appropriate for a community where no local transmission has occurred,” she said. The school closures that would be implemented the following month—and that endured through the end of the school year in nearly all of the roughly 13,800 school districts in the United States, in regions that had wildly different infection levels—showed this directive was not followed.

Emerging and/or re-emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) in the East Africa region are associated with climate change-induced environmental drivers. There is a need for a comprehensive understanding of these environmental drivers and to adopt an integrated risk analysis (IRA) framework for addressing a combination of the biological, environmental and socioeconomic factors that increase population vulnerabilities to EID risks to inform biological risk mitigation and cross-sectoral decision-making. The aim of this integrative review was to identify knowledge gaps and contribute to a holistic understanding about the environmental drivers of Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV), Marburg virus (MARV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infections in the East Africa Region to improve IRA processes at the environment-animal-human exposure interface.

THREE PEOPLE HAVE DIED in Texas and more than five hundred have gotten sick in what is shaping up as the largest single measles outbreak in decades. And somehow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still hasn’t provided a firm, unambiguous endorsement of vaccination, although you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise in light of the publicity around an interview he had with CBS News last week.

The interview aired on Wednesday, after Kennedy had met with the families of two Texas girls who recently died from the disease. The online version carried the headline “RFK Jr. says people should get the measles vaccine,” and if you happened to be on social media at the time (like I was) then some version of it probably popped onto your feeds.

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The blue rubber gloves and N95 masks in a Seattle senior living community used to mark a time of isolation, fear, loss.

Yet on a recent afternoon at Merrill Gardens in Ballard, these medical supplies are more like ornaments of the past, strung across the ceiling as an almost whimsical ode to how far we’ve come.

It’s been five years since the mysterious respiratory virus responsible for an emerging pandemic was identified in Washington state and the U.S., and forced millions of us, including hundreds of Merrill Gardens residents in the Northwest, to shut in, avoid physical contact and distance from one another for months.

Not today. On this particular gray Friday, residents and staffers are celebrating. Along with the PPE garlands, a colorful banner is pinned up in the window: “Heroes Work Here.”

“We didn’t lose a single person during COVID,” general manager Lisa Palm said, speaking just of the Ballard living facility, to a room of cheering residents. All were unmasked.

She raised a glass of Champagne. “Cheers to all that being in the past.”

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Aggressive deportation tactics have terrorized farmworkers at the center of the nation’s bird flu strategy, public health workers say.

Dairy and poultry workers have accounted for most cases of the bird flu in the U.S. — and preventing and detecting cases among them is key to averting a pandemic. But public health specialists say they’re struggling to reach farmworkers because many are terrified to talk with strangers or to leave home.

“People are very scared to go out, even to get groceries,” said Rosa Yanez, an outreach worker at Strangers No Longer, a Detroit-based Catholic organization that supports immigrants and refugees in Michigan with legal and health problems, including the bird flu. “People are worried about losing their kids, or about their kids losing their parents.”

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On Tuesday at a press conference, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his department's handling of measles cases, including the outbreak in Texas should be a "model for the rest of the world."

Kennedy said this is because cases have exploded more drastically in Europe -- though he didn't offer specifics on what he thinks has worked in the U.S. response.

"I would compare it to what's happening in Europe," he said. "They've had 127,000 cases and 37 deaths. And so what we're doing here in the United States is a model for the rest of the world."

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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed to imply in recent days that the measles outbreak in western Texas was slowing down.

In a post on X on Sunday, Kennedy remarked on the second death linked to the outbreak, which occurred in an unvaccinated school-aged child.

About 10 minutes later, Kennedy edited the post to add that the curve has been flattening since early March, when he started sending in reinforcements from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- supplying clinics with vaccines and other medications.

"Since that time, the growth rates for new cases and hospitalizations have flattened," he wrote.

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Slipping vaccination rates in West Texas have led to the state's largest measles outbreak in over 30 years, with more than 500 patients affected as of April 8 and cases spreading to New Mexico and Oklahoma. Last week, an unvaccinated Texas child died from measles, marking the third death tied to the outbreak.

Public health experts say there is a playbook for slowing outbreaks like this one: Identify cases. Isolate patients. Track where they've been and who they may have exposed. Most of all, drive up the vaccination rate.

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