Should we be worried about bird flu?
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today we’re talking about bird flu. It’s infecting flocks of chickens, causing egg prices to rise across the country, plus herds of dairy cattle and people are getting sick too. And all of this is happening amid sweeping changes at U.S. federal health agencies. The Trump administration has ordered mass firings and limits on public communications at agencies including the Centers for Disease Control, hindering its ability to keep the public informed. On the show today, Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and science communicator explains the scale of the current bird flu outbreak, how the response in the United States has been disrupted by chaos in the federal government, and why state health systems may struggle to fill the gaps after years of underfunding.
Plus, for one listener, doing something is better than nothing. And, another listener shares how they changed their mind about the value of government work.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “Urgent CDC Data and Analyses on Influenza and Bird Flu Go Missing as Outbreaks Escalate” from KFF Health News
- “Mass firings at HHS: Thousands impacted across federal health agencies including CMS, FDA” from Fierce Healthcare
- “RFK Jr. confirmed, elevating anti-vaccine activist to nation’s top health post” from The Washington Post
- “How Trump’s Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State” from The New York Times
- “The U.S. and the WHO: An Imperfect but Essential Relationship” from Johns Hopkins
What’s something you thought you knew but later found out you were wrong about? Email makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. |
| 0:07.6 | Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:11.4 | I'm Kyle Rizdal Tuesday today, February the 18th. |
| 0:14.3 | It is the day of the week where we do a single topic, talk about it for a while. |
| 0:18.3 | And we're going to talk about bird flu, public health, the public health |
| 0:22.1 | system amid everything. That's what we're going to talk about. Waves arms wildly. Wildly, yes. |
| 0:29.5 | We knew just who to call to help us deal with all of this. We had Jessica Malati-Rivera on the show a while back to talk about |
| 0:39.2 | long COVID. She's an epidemiologist and a science communicator. Welcome back, Jessica. |
| 0:44.8 | Hi, thanks for having me. So we have seen all these headlines over the past couple weeks about |
| 0:50.5 | bird flu, chickens being slaughtered, cows being infected, cats and people now getting sick, too. |
| 0:59.4 | How worried should we be about bird flu in particular? |
| 1:03.1 | Yeah, it is very concerning. I will start, though, by saying that a lot of the headlines are probably more panic-inducing than necessary. |
| 1:11.8 | That's not at all to downplay the seriousness of this outbreak. It is quite a lot of the headlines are probably more panic-inducing than necessary. That's not at all to downplay the seriousness of this outbreak. It is quite serious and it is quite unprecedented without |
| 1:17.7 | overusing that word. We haven't seen this kind of scale of outbreak of this virus, particularly |
| 1:24.1 | among mammals, mammals that have close proximity to humans. So cows in this case, |
| 1:29.8 | you know, we are a very agriculture-focused country. We have lots of dairy farms. We have lots of |
| 1:35.3 | chicken farms. So the issue of proximity is not to be understated here. That said, the virus has not |
| 1:43.3 | become a virus that can spread from human to human. |
| 1:46.2 | And that's really when things kind of go south. It has not happened yet. I'll also caveat that |
| 1:52.3 | by saying we also don't know exactly how much is spreading and where and to whom because we don't |
| 1:58.5 | have good data surveillance systems right now, which is a very |
| 2:00.8 | familiar thing you've probably heard me say, very familiar from the times of COVID, early in the |
... |
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