Bird flu update after UK farm worker infected and your questions on urinary problems
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
James Gallagher discusses the risk from H5N1 bird flu in the UK as a poultry worker in the West Midlands is infected and looks to the US where the disease is spreading in cattle. He's joined by virologist Dr Ed Hutchinson from the University of Glasgow to discuss how the virus is evolving, whether we are edging closer to bird flu becoming a pandemic and how it's being handled in the US as President Trump's government takes office.
Also, you've been sending in your questions on embarrassing health problems and lots of you have asked about the problem of leaking urine, known as urinary incontinence. James puts your questions to Dr Vanessa Apea, a consultant physician in Genito-urinary and HIV medicine at Barts Health NHS Trust and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.
Presenter: James Gallagher Producer: Tom Bonnett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Greg Jenna and good news, Your Dead to Me is back for a new series. Here we go. Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dor-Leon with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down. And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Ria Elena. I'm excited. You're dead to me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Welcome to the Inside Health podcast with me, James Gallagher. Episodes are released weekly wherever you get your podcasts, but if you're in the UK, |
| 0:40.4 | you can listen to the latest episodes a whole week earlier than anywhere else. |
| 0:44.6 | First on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:47.0 | Hello there. Later on Inside Health, we're going to take on one of the health problems that |
| 0:51.5 | you told us was way too embarrassing to talk about. |
| 0:54.9 | We'll see if we can manage. |
| 0:56.5 | But first, there's a lot going on with bird flu, also known as H5N1. |
| 1:01.5 | The UK Health Security Agency says a person in the West Midlands has contracted bird flu after close contact with infected animals. |
| 1:08.6 | It's only the seventh such case in the UK since 2021, |
| 1:12.2 | but officials said the risk to the wider public was very low. Meanwhile, tougher hygiene rules |
| 1:17.3 | for bird owners have been enforced to slow the virus's spread and there's continued concern |
| 1:22.6 | about bird flu circulating in US cattle. While to discuss the threat being posed and whether bird flu could become another pandemic, |
| 1:30.2 | I'm joined by Professor Ed Hutchinson, a virologist from the University of Glasgow. |
| 1:34.3 | Hello, Ed. |
| 1:34.8 | Hello, James. |
| 1:35.5 | Can you just very quickly get us up to speed with where we are with H5N1? |
| 1:39.4 | Because this is actually a virus that has been around four decades. |
| 1:43.2 | Sure, so this is a disease which has been causing quite severe outbreaks and poultry for 25 years now, |
| 1:48.8 | sometimes spilling over and causing severe disease in humans. |
| 1:52.0 | But it really took off in 2020, acquired mutations which allowed to spread aggressively |
| 1:56.0 | through bird populations around the world. |
| 1:58.4 | 2021, 2022 came to the UK and caused massive die-offs of seabirds. And it's continued to spread around the world. 2021, 2022 came to the UK and caused massive die-offs of sea birds, and it's continued to |
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