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Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith Rogers, and today we have an update on the H5N1 bird flu outbreak.

Stephanie Desmond talks to Hopkins virologist Andy Pecosh and Hopkins veterinarian Megan

Davis about recent developments, including the U.S.'s first death of a human, and why it's

time to double down on measures to respond to this virus. Let's listen.

Megan Davis and Andy Peckhosh, thanks so much for joining me.

A pleasure.

Always have to be here.

So the last time the three of us talked on the podcast was in November.

And we talked, of course, today's topic is bird flu.

And so I wanted to give an update on where things stand today.

I do know that we recently had a death from the bird flu.

There was an infection in a person in Louisiana.

He apparently acquired the infection because they had a backyard flock of

chickens that had become exposed to wild birds. Both the chickens, the person was raising,

as well as the wild birds, were found dead. The person got exposed by it, was hospitalized

and ended up dying from the infection. If that wasn't serious enough, when the CDC scientists sequenced

samples from this individual, they found that the virus had started to mutate at two particular

sites that we know are important for adapting H5N1 to better replicate in humans.

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