Belinda Smith

speaker

2,583 appearances 26 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 6d ago

Belinda Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 26 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.

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Health Report · Bird flu has reached Australia. Now what? · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

So it seemed to turn really nasty about 30 years ago and started causing mass mortality in chickens.

Chickens basically have a 100% mortality rate.

But the first human case of H5N1 happened soon after

it sort of emerged as this really pathogenic bird flu.

It was in May 1997 when a three-year-old boy was admitted to hospital in Hong Kong with sort of fluish-like symptoms.

He unfortunately died six days later, but it's thought that he caught it from infected chickens.

So this virus has been infecting people for a long time, almost as long as it's been a highly pathogenic influenza.

So the fact that it hasn't yet mutated to the point where it can do human to human transmission is quite interesting in itself.

Because this is what experts are really scared of, right?

Jumping from mammals to humans is one thing.

But once it starts being between humans, that's when you've got a pandemic on your hands.

And the issue here is when a normal human flu virus, like the seasonal flu, for instance, is in a person and that same person gets infected then with H5N1, when two viruses meet in the same vessel, being a human body or animal or whatever...

they can swap genetic material.

So even though H5N1 doesn't have the ability to jump from human to human, it might acquire that ability if it can swap that genetic material with a flu virus that can do that.

So that's why we want to keep human infections down as much as possible to stop that sort of cross-pollination of the genetic material.

And so in the US over the past year or so, the CDC has been gutted.

What does this mean for disease surveillance?

Don't let anything near it.

So if H5N1 does become a human pandemic...

What do we have in place then to protect us?

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