Here & Now's Peter O'Dowd speaks with epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo about the bird flu that has recently sickened dairy cows in several states but so far only one dairy worker in Texas.
Professor Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, joins host Megan Hall for a timely update on the recent outbreaks of H5N1 Bird Flu.
Excerpt: The discovery of bird flu virus particles in milk has moved the federal government to take more aggressive action to prevent the further spread of H5N1 on dairy farms. The Agriculture Department has rightly issued new testing recommendations meant to keep the virus from spreading across state lines. But this additional testing will do little to address the primary threat that H5N1 poses to humans: the infection of farmworkers. Our failure to protect them threatens their health and gives the virus an opportunity to evolve into a greater threat to people, including those who live far from dairy farms.
Excerpt: "It does feel like Ground Hog Day," said Jennifer Nuzzo, who heads Brown University's Pandemic Center. "We still seem to be stuck in reactive mode. We shouldn't be waiting for evidence that the virus is devastating us. We should be trying to act now to prevent the virus from devastating us."
Excerpt: But it's still not clear exactly where the flu virus has spread or what it's capable of, said several experts, including Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.
"Our surveillance is inadequate to know where this virus is and where it isn't, which is critical for protecting farmworkers and people involved in the dairy industry ‒ but also important for staying ahead of this virus to prevent a future pandemic," Nuzzo said.
Excerpt: “More testing is better,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. “But in many ways this policy is very leaky in terms of how much virus it will allow to move. And because we still don’t know what’s driving transmission between cows, we should not pin our hopes on this policy making a major dent in the infections we’re seeing.”
Excerpt: “Our job right now is to protect farmworkers,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. “We can’t do that unless we know where the virus is or where it isn’t.”
Excerpt: Some public health experts are concerned about how long that testing is taking — and the lack of transparency thus far about the government’s findings. Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, questioned why the FDA did not immediately say it would test milk products and expeditiously culture any potential virus fragments found.
“Just from a government credibility standpoint, being transparent about what you’re doing, it’s important,” Nuzzo said.
Excerpt: To really understand the scale of spread as well as possible mechanisms of viral transmission, it’s necessary to conduct widespread testing of animals with and without symptoms, said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. “If we’re only testing cows with outward symptoms, we’re missing infections in those without.”
Excerpt: So let's start with the latest update, particles of this virus found in commercial pasteurized milk. How concerned should the everyday consumer be?
Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, Brown University School of Public Health: I don't have any reason to be concerned at this point.
Finding evidence of genetic material, which is what the test results told us, by itself is not alarming. In order to know if the virus will infect us, we have to do a different kind of test. And this test was not that. They're actually undergoing those tests now.
But I don't have any reason to think that we will be harmed, because we use pasteurization. And I have no reason to think that the H5N1 virus is any different from all the other pathogens that we think could be in milk. Pasteurization doesn't remove the genetic material of those pathogens, but it changes the pathogens and either kills or it activates them, so that they can't infect us...
Excerpt: The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday said it had been testing milk samples throughout the dairy production process and confirmed the detection of viral particles “in some of the samples,” but declined to provide details.
The presence of genetic fragments of the virus in milk is not unexpected. Pasteurization typically works to inactivate pathogens, said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. Pasteurization generally does not remove genetic material, but it typically renders pathogens unable to cause harm to people, Nuzzo said.
Excerpt: For decades, public health experts have warned of the danger of H5N1, also known as the avian flu, crossing over to humans. That fear became a reality when earliest this month, a dairy farm worker in Texas tested positive for the highly pathogenic avian influenza. This is the first reported cow-to-human spread of the virus. The U.S. has only ever recorded a handful of cases but there is mounting concern that mutations in the virus will allow it to spread to more mammals and possibly, more people. Are we ready for an influenza pandemic of this kind? Joining us today on AirTalk to talk about this latest outbreak and the threat it poses to humans is Jennifer Nuzzo, Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University.
Excerpt: For a virus to have pandemic potential, it needs to be able to pass easily from person-to-person. H5N1 does not have the ability to do so, but scientists fear it could develop this feature.
“The bigger picture is that this virus is not cooling off,” CFR Senior Fellow Jennifer Nuzzo told Politico. “We’ve been worrying about this virus for twenty years, more than twenty years. And in the last year, it has really been remarkable in how far across the globe it has been spreading, and how many species it’s been affecting.”
Excerpt: “The bigger picture is that this virus is not cooling off,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. “We’ve been worrying about this virus for 20 years, more than 20 years. And in the last year, it has really been remarkable in how far across the globe it has been spreading, and how many species it’s been affecting.”
Excerpt: "I worry a little bit that the perceived speed with which we were able to develop safe and effective vaccines has given people unrealistic expectations," said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. "Nevertheless, we did something remarkable, and we proved to ourselves that we can do hard things," she added.
A new exercise, highlighting the ability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to meet pandemic threats, will be tested this week at the Munich Security Conference.
Excerpt: If this change takes place, it shouldn't be interpreted to mean that COVID-19 is less contagious, says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.
"The science of COVID has not changed," Nuzzo says. If you test positive for COVID-19, you're likely contagious for a few days at least and risk spreading the coronavirus to others.
Excerpt: The proposed recommendations also seem not to take into account older Americans, or those who are immunocompromised or otherwise at risk of severe outcomes from Covid, said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health.
Dr. Nuzzo said she has an aunt with cancer who had twice contracted Covid in a health care facility. “I do feel for people who now feel even less protected,” she said.
At the very least, the C.D.C. should advise that people who end isolation after one fever-free day also wear N95 masks or the equivalent when leaving their homes, she added.
The second installment of the Pandemic Center’s “Our Storied Health” series highlights environmental injustice in the American South, and explores the potential of storytelling to advance public health.
Article by Pandemic Center Director Jennifer Nuzzo: It’s been just over six months since physician Mandy Cohen took the helm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), emphasizing that making the agency more transparent is essential for rebuilding the public’s trust in our national health agency. To achieve this, the CDC must get better at sharing data with the public.
A newly opened Washington base for the Pandemic Center at Brown’s School of Public Health will expand impact and connect current and future public health leaders with national and global policymakers.
Excerpt: Jennifer B. Nuzzo, DrPH, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health: Here's what I haven't seen that I would like to see ... I would like to see a bipartisan commitment to have a serious assessment of what went wrong during the pandemic. We need to get to the bottom of this in the same way that we wanted to get to the bottom of what went wrong during 9/11. A number of the United States’ challenges were probably as much about government effectiveness as they were about lack of resources, money, etc. We need to really, truly have an audit. Not necessarily in a punitive way, but a true audit.
Excerpt: Herd immunity provided a temporary reprieve, but it also created a new problem. A lower incidence of Zika meant less commercial interest in making a vaccine, because the market for a Zika vaccine would by definition be smaller. Vaccine companies also struggled to find populations in which to test a vaccine, because too few people now had confirmed Zika infections. "The general momentum that was behind the development of a Zika vaccine ground to a halt," says Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University.
The Advance Warning and Response Exemplars (AWARE) project will identify positive outliers in successful early warning and response to significant public health events, including outbreaks of pathogens of pandemic potential as well as climate-sensitive infectious diseases
Article by Pandemic Center Senior Advisor Wilmot James:
One of two freshly recruited lecturers from the University of Stellenbosch who joined the University of the Western Cape in the early 1970s, Janis Grobbelaar was a person of Afrikaner background who walked a very different path.
Excerpt: A major effort is under way to put a resolution before the next World Health Organisation (WHO) assembly, scheduled for May 27-June 1 2024, to advance a strategic dialogue about establishing globally applicable norms, standards and protocols for biosafety, biosecurity and biosurveillance in the age of genetic engineering.
This week in Cape Town the annual conference of the African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) is meeting to discuss the challenge of advancing scientific work on disease-causing pathogens while ensuring this is done safely and securely in properly equipped laboratories. There is considerable momentum in the post-Covid world to put guardrails in place to ensure genetic engineering stays in its lane while not stifling the great benefits of science applications to advance health.
This December marks four years since the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. On this episode of Trending Globally, Dan Richards speaks with two experts from the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health about the ways our society’s approach to public health has changed since 2019.
They discuss how we should be thinking about COVID-19 in our daily lives, the unexpected ways international conflicts have changed conversations around pandemic preparedness, and what the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 can teach us about how societies learn from disasters.
Guest on today’s episode:
Jennifer Nuzzo is an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University’s School of Public Health
Wilmot James is an internationally recognized leader in the fields of global health, international security, and a Senior Advisor to the Pandemic Center.
Excerpt: Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, said the toll of the respiratory virus season should not be dismissed even if some trends have improved.
“The lesson we have yet to learn is how fragile our health-care system is,” Nuzzo said. “If you have to go to an emergency room on an average winter day, you may be waiting a long time because there’s a lot of other people trying to get care.”
With the expanded scope of biosecurity involving human, animal, and plant-based pathogens, there is a need for increased collaboration across sectors — human health, veterinary and agricultural authorities must work together to address potential biosecurity threats comprehensively.
Life expectancy in the United States rose in 2022, the first increase since the COVID pandemic began, according to new federal data. But those gains were not enough to compensate for the years of life lost to the virus, which remains one of the nation’s top causes of death.
“Misinformation research is a young field, so diverse approaches are good and important,” says Claire Wardle, co-director of the Information Futures Lab, professor of the practice of health services, policy and practice at the Brown University School of Public Health, and a co-author of the study. “What’s also clear is that this field emerged after concerns about the role of misinformation in elections, so many of the key researchers come from political science. As we have seen misinformation impact a number of different topics and issues, it is time researchers from different disciplines investigating misinformation come together to connect the dots.”
The Pandemic Center kicks off Brown Arts IGNITE film and media series with pre-release screening of Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s “Shot in the Arm,” followed by panel discussion.
This article was authored by Pandemic Center Director Jennifer B. Nuzzo and Jorge R. Ledesma and was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Volume 37, Number 4—Fall 2023—Pages 3–22).
Excerpt: ...living with uncertainty is scary. “We can blame the people who are pushing misinformation, but we can’t take away the fact that a lot of this is caused by the absence of answers,” says [Claire] Wardle. “We might not have all the science, but by saying nothing we create vacuums that get filled by conspiracy theories.”
Excerpt: The School of Public Health’s Pandemic Center will host a screening of the new documentary “Shot in the Arm” Monday, Oct. 30 at 6 p.m. Directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy and executive produced by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the film explores the history of vaccine hesitancy and its relevance in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Excerpt: The priority, however, is to get vaccinated before sickness starts spreading. Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiology professor and director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, previously told Inverse that the best time to get inoculated is, essentially, before you’re infected. Of course, when flu, Covid-19, and RSV cases rise in later autumn, you’re much more likely to contract at least one of them.
Excerpt: Naming Omicron subvariants after creatures or asteroids can make them sound more unique or threatening than they are, said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University’s School of Public Health.
“People think this variant is something we’ve never seen before that we’re not going to have immunity against,” she said. “And that’s not at all true.”
Excerpt: Covid was exceptional in 2020 when it was a new and deadly illness that tore into an unprepared human population. In 2023, widespread immunity — alongside tools such as masks, testing, treatments, updated boosters and improved ventilation — can empower people to protect themselves and others while resuming most normal activities.
“I’m less worried than I was last year, and I was less worried last year than I was the year before,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University School of Public Health. “But I’m aware, and I’m looking and trying to make sure nothing changes.”